


Hard times come again no more

by dilangley



Category: Red Dead Redemption, Red Dead Redemption (Video Games)
Genre: Canon Divergence, Eventual Smut, Gen, Journeys and homemaking, M/M, RDR1 time frame, Reuniting these cowboys, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-30
Updated: 2019-12-24
Packaged: 2020-10-02 00:53:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 21
Words: 61,048
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20455202
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dilangley/pseuds/dilangley
Summary: Arthur Morgan is living in Mexico when he catches word of John Marston. He goes on a journey to find his lost brother. In doing so, he just might bring himself back to life.





	1. Chuparosa

**Author's Note:**

> Two important and critical canon divergences:
> 
> 1\. Arthur does not have tuberculosis. 
> 
> 2\. Because he does not have tuberculosis, the mountaintop scene did not involve him dying. Instead, it was just the final, ugly dissolution of the van der Linde gang.
> 
> I have written this whole story (50,000+ words -- phew!) so I am revising, editing, and cleaning up one chapter a week to post it. I had to step away a bit for my beta-less editing to have any impact.
> 
> Yeehaw, y'all. Let's do this thing.
> 
> The title is an old folk song "Hard times come again no more" from the 1850s/60s. James Taylor, Emmylou Harris, Kristin Chenowith... the covers are everywhere. I listened most prominently to the Anonymous 4 version while writing, but you can't go wrong with this song.

* * *

Arthur Morgan had been living dead for a decade when his past caught up to him. 

The gulf coastline had her own beauty, and he had sketched her curves many evenings under the burning sunset. He often sat out to watch the boats come in. It was routine, simple. He never expected to be on the docks, listening to the chatter of Spanish he still barely understood, when life found him again.

_ “Sí, en todo el país. Su nombre es John Marston. Nadie sabe si es un rebelde o un cerdo del gobierno.” _

The fisherman spoke with all the waggish enthusiasm of a man with the latest gossip, discernable across language barriers, and Arthur closed the journal in his lap. 

“¿_No es solo una historia _?”

_ “No. Los rebeldes no tienen tiempo para historias de fantasmas. Mi hermano lo conoció.” _

“Excuse me, partner,” Arthur said. The men turned to look his way. “Did you say there’s an American named John Marston here?”

“_ Si. _”

“Where?”

“_Yo no se _. They say he is...” The man hesitated and found the word. “Trouble.”

“I have no doubt,” Arthur mumbled. Only when he made it back to his shack, claimed from the brink of rot a few years ago and repaired to service, did he realize his insides had gone numb and cold.

John Marston. Alive. Somewhere in Mexico.

The decision to go find him made itself.

* * *

Chuparosa had all the makings of a lousy town. The local economy had neither tourism nor industry, and the dry, barren land around it smelled like desert heat and emptiness. But unlike so many of the other run-down towns dotting Nuevo Paraiso, Chuparosa had a niche. It was the American gateway to Mexico, at least for those crossing the Rio Grande without papers. Arthur would have known the way even without his faded hand-drawn map of his travels, for he had come through Chuparosa himself a few years ago.

He tugged the reins of his horse. “Easy, girl.”

The town looked exactly the same. If he were the sentimental type, he might have imagined himself in his skin then: angry, lost, broken, and lonely. Oh so lonely. Crushingly lonely. He had gotten used to its weight now, the constant companionship of no one, but then it had still chafed. He had ordered two whiskeys in the lousy bar with the last coins in his pocket, hustled himself enough pesos for a horse, and set off on his own for the first time in more than twenty years.

Arthur hitched his horse -- a dark bay mare he had named Grim for reasons he would never let himself say aloud -- outside the church. He walked inside and tried to look reverent as he strolled past the sparse parishioners praying in their pews. The pistols at his side were hidden by a duster coat, but the repeater strapped across his back could not be hidden, so he tried to arrange his face so as not to arouse fear. A pastor stood at the pulpit, scribbling furiously in a copy of the Bible. 

“Hey there, fella. I’ve got a question for you.” Arthur had mastered the pleasantly neutral tone needed for language difficulties. Years in a foreign land had shaved down the high volume and dramatic hand motions. “Do you speak English?”

“No.” The pastor shook his head. Arthur frowned, an instinctive hand twitching at his side for a gun, an intimidation, a way to use force to get what he wanted. Ever since he heard John’s name a week ago, he had been like a snake shedding its skin, and he couldn’t yet see what new pattern was going to emerge. Once he had been one of the wildest outlaws in the west, less respected than Dutch van der Linde but perhaps more feared. 

That was a long time gone. If it had ever existed at all. Now it felt more like a blurry, unbelievable dream, half-forgotten and senseless, than a memory. 

“Does anyone here speak English?” Arthur asked. The pastor shrugged one shoulder and motioned to the people in the pews with an inviting expression. Arthur took it as permission to ask. He repeated his question a little louder and scanned the faces. A woman in the second pew waited for a beat before she lifted her head and looked at him with sharp eyes. Arthur expected her to say “I do,” but she did not.

“The sheriff,” she said, standing up. 

“Where can I find him?” Arthur asked. The pastor held up his hands uncertainly, and Arthur searched his brain for the Spanish. He could only remember one of the words he needed. “_ Donde?” _

The pastor turned to the woman in the pew. Though she had stood up, she had not left. The pastor answered the question in several sentences, but when the woman turned to Arthur, she said only, 

“He doesn’t know.”

The contraction gave something away. “You speak English too.”

Her face, lined with shallow wrinkles, could have been that of a young woman aged prematurely by sun and hard living or an older woman preserved by indoor teas and gentility. Her simple brown dress could have been church-visiting humility or poverty. The contradiction of it all put Arthur back on his heels.

“Yes. I had an American governess as a child.”

“That’s good. Listen--” Arthur began, but she interrupted.

“There is no good reason an American,” she said, looking him up and down, “who doesn’t even speak Spanish comes to Chuparosa. I know why you are here. I cannot do anything about that business. But I don’t have to help.”

Arthur had the decency to feel a little ashamed. He had been one of the men she described, riding into the crossover town asking for English speakers to help him navigate his way in a place he should not have been. He kept that to himself.

“I live in Puerto Morelos. Have for years. I’m just a slow study with language.”

“Oh.” She softened. “Then I apologize for my assumption.”

The other parishioners in their pews had switched from curious to irritated by Arthur’s intrusion.

“When you’re finished praying, could I ask you some questions?”

“There is a patio outside the bar. You know it?” She waited for his nod. “We can talk there. Buy something first. Eduardo needs Americans who pay at the bar, not just under tables in front of it.”

“Yes, ma’am.” He tipped his hat and made his way out. 

* * *

The woman could pray. Arthur had finished his whiskey and made it halfway through his beer, and she still had not emerged from the church. He took out his journal, a slapdash canvas one he bought from the merchant in town, and sketched the beer he had bought for the woman, sweating on the table. He growled a low grunt when the line came crooked out of his pencil.

“It looks fine.” The woman took the seat opposite him and did not smile. Out in the direct sunlight, Arthur guessed her age at mid-thirties. “You draw.”

“Sometimes.” He held out his hand, guessing she would be the kind of woman to prefer a handshake to gentlemanly greetings. “Arthur Morgan.”

She shook firmly. “Inga Jimenez.”

“I’m looking for an old friend, Inga. I heard he might be in Mexico, and since I’ve been here a while, I wanted to find him and see if he needs any help. His name’s John Marston,” Arthur said. 

Inga’s eyes held no flicker of recognition. “One man in a whole country? That will not be so easy.”

“No.” He disliked hearing the hopelessness of his crusade put into words. 

“Tell me about yourself.” She pressed her lips together, her face a challenge. To refuse would be to lose the potential of this contact, and Arthur wanted this intelligent, lean creature on his side. The only other English speaker he had met here in town so far had been a bow-legged mercenary ready to sell him papers through broken, preposition-less phrases.

“I lost my father in 1899, and with it, I lost my reason for staying put. I wanted to put as much land between me and everything as I could. When I hit the water in a new country, I figured that was far enough.”

That lie had no whiff of bullshit; even to Arthur, it smelled true. He remembered standing on the side of the mountain, Pinkertons clumsily scaling the slopes, the sun hiding behind ominous clouds, as he begged Dutch. This time, with John, Abigail, and Jack on the road to safety, Arthur had come back for Dutch, the last man on the sinking ship he wanted to save. It had been a stupid, foolish act of love. Its conclusion had hurt more terribly than any death.

“My mother and father died last year. The pain will never go away. They were professors.” Inga laughed softly at the question in his eyes. “Yes. Even my _ mama _. They spoke out against President Sanchez and his treatment of the poor. They spoke out against his desire for American allies over a desire for his people to live free and well.”

The rumblings of revolution had even reached to shake the ground beneath Arthur’s tiny shack. He had watched it with the dispassionate apathy of someone who no longer believed in anyone’s ideals.

“Are you a revolutionary too?” He asked.

“Ah.” She picked up the beer on the table and sipped it before answering. “Yes. I am a revolutionary. The question I am waiting to answer for myself is whether or not I am a rebel.”

“I knew a Mexican revolutionary once.” Here, under a sunshiny, cloudless sky, he remembered Javier with his guitar and his reticence. Once he had asked Javier if he missed his home and the man had looked at him with eyes as deep as wells and said only, “Of course,” as if Arthur must be a moron for not understanding home as a place rather than a gathering of people.

“In the United States?”

He nodded. “Twenty years ago he ran. I’m surprised there’s no peace here yet.”

“There will be.” Her voice burned with brimstone. “It may take bloodshed to get it.”

“I don’t know if violence is worth it for a dream.” Arthur shrugged. “Ideas don’t bleed. People do.”

She tilted her head to observe him. “Dismissing a revolution as a fight of ideas is too easy. The people are bleeding now. Girls younger than you or I rounded up like cattle for Allende’s pleasure. Farmhouses burned with families screaming inside for the crime of reading the wrong book.”

“Is the government really that bad? In the United States, we heard Sanchez was going to be different.”

“He is different. He is worse.” She met his gaze with dark eyes snapping. “Do you believe in signs, Arthur?”

“I don’t believe in much of anything anymore.”

“I came to Chuparosa a few weeks ago to watch what is happening, away from the quiet of my parents’ home. Today, I went to the church to pray to God for an answer about my place in this revolution, and you walked in.”

“That’s not a sign. I’m just a man looking for his friend.”

She scanned him once more, and he imagined himself through her eyes. In the mirror, he saw a tired, sour old man, but she might see him as others here had: a grizzled American outlaw, loaded for bear and tough as steel. She would not be the first one to ask a favor of him, so he recognized the expression on her face, perhaps even before she did.

“We could both be of help to one another,” Inga finally said.

“A quid pro quo,” Arthur said. The Latin summoned a memory of Hosea, eyes sparkling, tying his cravat and planning heists.

“No,” Inga said. “I will try to help you find your friend either way.”

All the reasons to say no melted in the face of that best of cons. 

“So a professor’s daughter is ready to fight.” He held out his hand for hers, and sensing that he had no nefarious intentions, she offered it. He touched the palm carefully. Though not weather-chapped or leathery, her hand had firm lines of callous where the lines of reins rubbed, short fingernails with rims of dark dirt. This hand had done work. “I’ll help.”

“Thank you.” 

They bent together, heads low, and she explained her concerns, the information she wanted from behind locked doors in the bank. She never asked him more about his friend, and he wished she would. He wanted to talk about John Marston to let someone else convince him he was not a fool for tearing off across Mexico after a grown man who didn’t need him. It had been a long time. 

But Arthur had never known a John Marston who didn’t need his steady hand, and he could not shake the fear that John was in trouble, that the fantasy of the Marstons living a quiet, happy life on a ranch somewhere had just been a comforting delusion to help Arthur sleep at night.


	2. The Bank Job

Arthur spent two days casing the bank job. Inga’s plan -- sneak in at night and steal paperwork from an unknown location inside -- would never work. The reason for bank robberies in the day was simple: banks were less heavily guarded then. At night, he told her, small-town law would hang around the outside as leisurely protection. He confirmed his own wisdom on the first night. From a carefully selected seat on the bar's patio, he watched the sheriff set up shop right there at the side of the bank, paying scruffy civilians to patrol the town while he read a book by lantern light. 

The second day, Arthur told Inga they would need two other people if she wanted to be hands-on, three if she wanted to keep herself safe. The indignant look she had given him had nearly made him laugh.

“Two then,” he said.

She found two people whom he had no doubt knew how to be rebels. The first man could not have weighed more than a hundred pounds soaking wet and spoke in a quiet, fraught voice. His words trembled in his throat like a man who could not unsee terrible things. The other man, heavy-set and quick-footed, shook Arthur’s hand with an iron grip and asked him his opinion of Abraham Reyes. When Arthur could not produce one, he had looked relieved.

“We don’t need any more American opinions in Mexican politics,” the man, Fernando, said. “But we appreciate your help.”

Arthur didn’t bother to point out that Inga had recruited these men to help him, not the other way around. The distinction would not be helpful. He laid out the plan carefully. If he was right, the clerks in this bank were more likely to be rebel sympathizers than government lackeys. One of the men would go in and spin the familiar, honest tale of hard workers routed by the system. If he got sympathy and the clerk seemed amenable, they might be able to talk him into letting them take what they wanted. That had been one of Hosea’s old tricks: offer to stage a robbery so the clerk could get a cut without getting in trouble. 

Inga, having no idea the brilliance was borrowed, had seemed very impressed.

The night before the hit, Arthur found himself in his rented room in Chuparosa with Inga seated on the bed, Fernando in a chair at the small writing desk, and Sabastian silent on the floor. Sabastian had no English; Fernando had enough. They all spoke Spanish now, but Arthur recognized the rhythm of their conversation. He listened without understanding and cleaned his pistol. They were knitting themselves together as a group, with stories and camaraderie, before the job came. Maybe it was human nature, maybe it was because Dutch had created a family of philosophies, but they had done the same thing. It had never been about business or money in the early days. It had always been a crusade. 

Arthur did not like the feeling he had been here before. All the memories, locked behind a dam, threatened to break loose, and if they did, they just might swallow him. 

He interrupted. “Inga. Have you asked them about John Marston?”

All three of them looked at him. She nodded. “They do not know him, but they say there are other Americans involved in the revolution. Tomorrow I am going with them to Agave Viejo. You are welcome to join us.”

“You’re going without even reading the papers?” Arthur asked.

“I suppose I am a rebel.” Inga smiled. “I know what the papers will say. I know Colonel Allende is stealing from the farmers in this region just as I know that a revolution is the only way he will be stopped.”

_ “Ella tiene fe,”  _ Fernando said. Arthur raised an eyebrow.

“Faith,” Inga translated. “He is saying that I have faith.”

Arthur went back to cleaning his guns and said no more.

  
  


* * *

  
  


It was perfect weather for armed robbery. The sun burned in the sky, but a brisk, cool breeze snatched away its heat. People milled about the market with vigor, buying and selling under the clear blue sky.

Fernando entered the bank first, chatted with the clerk in the low bellyaching that defied language. The clerk launched into a string of complaints. Even without Spanish, Arthur could follow that much from the animated voice; he could envision the speaker waving his hands around emphatically. He and Inga sat on the bench outside the door, listening. She wore plain tan cotton today, a skirt to the ground in spite of his suggestions that she might want to bring a belt to loop it up, and he had on all black, an old habit unwilling to die. She looked like a part of the landscape, unmemorable. He looked like a bank robber. 

“The teller is complaining about their cut wages. He says the president of the bank has expensive new suits and a new watch, but he is struggling to feed his family,” Inga said.

“I’ve heard that story before.”

Within minutes, Fernando came outside to them. Sabastian materialized beside them, stepping out of the shadows of the alleyway. For Arthur’s benefit, Fernando spoke English. “You were right.  _ Viva la revolucion _ .”

“Sure.” Arthur nodded. “That’s the easy way. Inga can keep her hands clean then. We go in, guns blazing, stupid American doing the shouting and the lockbreaking, and then we ride like hell for anywhere but here.”

They all still stared at him, Sabastian waiting for instructions he could understand, Inga and Fernando just waiting for Arthur to tell them what to do. These people, in spite of their willingness to break the law, were no criminals. 

“Inga, you make sure the horses are lined up and ready to go right outside the town wall.” He went through the checklist in his mind, trained her the same way he had trained kids before her. “Check their hooves for rocks or anything that might cause us a problem in a pursuit. Make sure everyone’s reins are knotted short and at the withers.”

“Fernando, you and Sabastian don’t say anything when we bust in. You want the rumors to pin the blame on a memorable American. You need to shoot or no one will ever believe it’s a robbery. Put at least two shots through the walls where they won’t hit anyone. Any other shots can go through the ceiling. Warning shots are common enough in robberies.”

“Follow my lead, and I’ll try not to do anything stupid,” Arthur finished as he got to his feet. Fernando ran through the instructions again in hurried Spanish. Sabastian nodded.

“Good luck,” Inga said. She tucked a hand at Arthur's elbow and squeezed before hurrying off. Arthur decided this was not the best time to tell her this heist was small potatoes in both contents and difficulty, but he wished someone would tell his body that news. The adrenaline coursed through his veins, the highest high a man could feel, the moment he stepped out of anonymity and into the spotlight to take another man’s riches. God, he used to love it. 

Arthur strode through the front doors, pushing them open with wide, dramatic arms. A few people, a young couple by the safety deposit boxes, an older gentleman on a bench reading his bank statements with tired eyes, jolted. He could hear the twin footfalls of the men behind him, and he reached coolly into his holster and trained his pistol directly on the teller’s forehead. The man may have known something was going to happen, but Arthur had played this one right: the fear and wide eyes were real. He could not have anticipated a big American with a gun trained directly on him.

“How about you open up the vaults right now?” Arthur growled.

The man stammered out affirmation and extracted a key ring from his desk drawer with shaky hands.

“How about a little goddamned faster?” He raised his voice, shifted his gun down, and squeezed the trigger. The shot echoed in the tiny space, and the teller squeaked as splinters of wood from the desk sprayed up like confetti.

_ “Si. Si.” _ He opened the gated door, one so rickety Arthur could have taken it down with a good kick, and Arthur snatched the keys out of his tight grip. Arthur turned to make eye contact with Fernando and Sabastian, gave them a little nod. The gunfire ricocheted in the small space, but none of the screams that followed were of pain, only fear. 

In the bank room, Arthur followed the instructions Inga had given him to look in the locked back office. He tried each key methodically. None of them fit. 

“Shit.” He fished a lockbreaker out of his satchel and set to work. Unlike bank vaults, intricate with tiny mechanisms vibrating under his touch, this door had a simple heavy latch-lock. He jammed and wiggled until it thudded loose. Inside the office, the bank looked completely different. Unlike the stark exterior or the plain, clean interior, this office favored domestic bliss with soft curtains framing its windows and a patterned rug on the floor. Arthur picked up one of the many framed photographs on the desk. Stone-faced and stiff in a portrait studio, a family of five sat together. The father, with a thick mustache and surprisingly kind eyes, did not look like a man who would screw people out of their hard-scraped funds.

Arthur rifled through desk drawers and file folders, looking for keywords that might suggest bank fraud. Mostly he found old chewing tobacco canisters and chocolate bar wrappers. But finally, in a dummy compartment of a back drawer, he found paperwork. He skimmed, frowned, and read a little closer before giving up. His Spanish was useless, but no one hid legitimate, innocent papers in fake compartments. He stuffed every one of them into his satchel.

He grabbed the bagging sacks from beside the money vaults and filled two of them with the other papers. A bit of showmanship never hurt.

“Let’s go, boys.” He held up the two sacks with a grin as he walked back into the lobby. “Our troubled days are over.”

They kept glaring like professionals until they were thundering away on their horses to the symphony of whizzing gunshots and yells from law enforcement. Then they could not hide their grins, and a rush of pride made Arthur a little dizzy. Maybe he had just done some goddamned good in the country he had never considered home.

The dam in his heart cracked under new pressure.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just a short little chapter! The next section needed to stay together, so this one ended up more compact. It's great seeing kudos from y'all, and I thrill at comments because they give me excuses to talk Red Dead!


	3. Agave Viejo

Agave Viejo had all the makings Arthur expected of a camp: loud, raucous singing at night, bitching about chores during the day, and the occasional impassioned speech from a benevolent leader. When they rode in the first night, horses lathered and tired, Fernando and Sabastian were greeted with enthusiasm, Arthur with neutrality, and Inga with surprising coolness. Amongst these peasants, the professors’ daughter had blue-blood bourgeoisie. It was not appreciated, and she did not stay.

Arthur watched her ride away, surprised at her lack of conviction, surprised at any revolution stupid enough to turn away a woman with her fire.

No one bothered to speak English on his behalf, but Sabastian motioned to space on the outer edge of the camp where he could pitch a tent. Arthur set himself up and spent two days looking for openings to be helpful. A woman carrying heavy water, men unbaling hay for the horses, children mending holey socks: he joined in and asked,  _ “¿Conoces a John Marston?” _

In the afternoon of the second day, Fernando came to find him while he was chopping firewood. 

“Arthur,” Fernando greeted. “You have been busy.”

“Just trying to help out where I can,” Arthur replied. He walked the hatchet into an unsplit log and used the conversation as an excuse to clench and unclench his fingers. His bones ached more than he liked to admit these days. Perhaps knuckles and fingers remembered best the impact of every dirty deed done. “As long as I’m here.”

“I have been writing to Inga. She is still looking for your friend. Has anyone here met him?” 

“Not that I can tell,” Arthur said. “But you didn’t come find me to ask me about that. What can I do for you?”

“You helped us for Inga. You are not a rebel. But we need men. There is a supply train moving from Chuparosa to Casa Madrugada, and we need those supplies.”

Arthur had always seen himself as a mercenary, for hire for money or for information, and in this fight, he had neither. Mexico had been good to him in the way that the land is good to a deer scratching out a living. He paid no taxes to its government and counted no friendships among its people, at least not until the last couple of days. He owed Fernando nothing. If anything, Fernando owed him. He was the one who had relieved the bank in Chuparosa of their fraudulent papers.

But something in the other man’s face made it impossible to say no. The earnest set of his jaw, the steel in his eyes… this was a man whose principles held him upright in the world. Arthur had always liked those men, had always kind of wanted to be one.

“And you need the army not to have those supplies,” Arthur added.

“Yes.”

“You have a plan?”

“Yes.” Fernando nodded. “It is not mine. It is Reyes’.”

Arthur had not yet met the esteemed leader, so that endorsement had little value. Still, he agreed to ride out with them. 

“Thank you. You are a friend of this revolution.”

“I wouldn’t say that until you’ve seen me do more than wave a gun at a teller in on the take,” Arthur scoffed, but a gruff little smile appeared anyway. He went back to chopping firewood. There was a new group of men gathering around the scout fire. One of them might have heard of John.

  
  


* * *

  
  


Abraham Reyes rode into the camp on a literal white horse, and Arthur’s breath caught in his chest. The man looked nothing like Dutch van der Linde, with deep tan skin and a vibrant sarape dramatically punctuating his plainer clothing, and the horse, a beauty to be sure, had none of The Count’s fire in his eyes. But somehow, the effect was the same. The people of the camp gravitated toward him without losing their dignity, and he became the center of it all. 

Arthur had to take a break, find a quiet spot with his journal and a charcoal pencil, to spill out some thoughts. He carefully avoided Dutch’s name in the journal, carefully avoided all of those memories he would not face. Instead, he outlined Reyes’ arrival and the reactions of the rebels. He sketched the man on his horse.

His pencil took on a life of its own and scrawled the words:  _ I hope they are not wrong about this. _

He stared at it, scratched a hard underline below the word “wrong,” and made his way back toward the camp. Sabastian spotted him and made his way over. The man’s slim silence rarely became words, but it did so now.

“Arthur, hello,” he said. Arthur recognized the effort behind the use of the English greeting.

_ “Hola, _ Sabastian,” he replied. “You good, er,  _ bueno _ ?”

Sabastian nodded.  _ “Inga está de vuelta. Con Reyes.” _

“Inga is back,” Arthur repeated what he thought he had heard. Sabastian confirmed. “I guess I had best go see her.”

Arthur added hand motions to his words that he hoped conveyed his meaning, and Sabastian started walking, glancing back at him like a man taking a new sheepdog to work for the first time, afraid he was not being followed.

“I have got to learn Spanish,” Arthur said to no one in particular. 

Sabastian led him up the low steps into the main building. What must have once been a lovely farmhouse home had been deconstructed into war headquarters. Arthur stepped on deep drag marks in the old hardwood floors as they approached a heavy oak table in the center of the foyer. From behind it, Abraham Reyes looked up. He grinned, confident, a little feral.

_“Hola,_ _Senor _Morgan. I hear you have joined our cause.”

“I’ve helped out a little.” Arthur extended his hand, and Abraham clasped it in both of his. He had the hard, confident shake of a man with power. “Mostly for selfish reasons.”

“Inga says you are looking for a lost friend from your past,” Abraham said. Only then did Arthur notice Inga, seated in an old, upholstered chair in the corner. She smiled at him. “She also says you are a sign from God that she was meant to join the revolution. I am surprised you could do what I could not.”

“Me too.” Arthur shot her a quizzical look. She shrugged, and he did not press for more information.

“Tomorrow you will ride with my brothers to steal supplies. I would like to know you first.” 

“Fair enough.”

“I have work to do.” Abraham waved his hand over the collection of papers and maps on the table. “But I will come find you later. We will talk over whiskey as American men do.”

“Sure.” Arthur knew when he had been dismissed, but he waited a beat. Savvy enough to recognize why, Inga rose to her feet.

“Would you like to go for a ride, Arthur? I promised Sabastian I would go into town and check the mail. I could use the company.” She held out her arm for him like a lady. 

A long time ago, when he was a knock-kneed teenager whose temper flared in an instant, Hosea had always tried to calm him down with a chore, a task to be accomplished, where Dutch had tried reason but then had let him slug it out, Dutch’s shirt sleeves cuffed up and his rings dropped in a tin mug for afterward. But it had been Bessie Matthews, with her twinkly blue eyes and soft hands, who had been wisest of all. 

“Take a lady into town, Arthur?” Bessie used to say, and she would offer him her arm just like this. He would puff up like a bullfrog to be seen as the man for the job, anger evaporating in cocksure arrogance. Arthur almost smiled as he accepted Inga’s touch.

“Why, yes ma’am. That sounds mighty fine.” 

  
  


* * *

  
  


The sky blurred through all shades of a sunset as they rode back from Casa Madrugada. In town, Inga had gathered a stack of mail, many of the letters addressed to names he had never heard around the campfire. He supposed the ways of living outside the law were universal. If Inga hadn’t been new to the whole business, she might have started ripping open the envelopes and reading the letters aloud for fun. As it was, she very politely bundled them into her bag and made conversation instead.

“Do you write as well as draw?” Inga asked.

“No. I guess I write a little. Just about my day. A habit I picked up when I was a teenager. I don’t write stories or nothing.”

“I would have guessed that. You’re a man of too few words to be a writer.”

Arthur shrugged. “You’ve got me pegged.”

“A writer might have said something about the friend for whom he is going to such efforts.” Arthur glanced over at her, perched on the edge of the wooden seat, eyes wide and interested. Her smart mouth set in a curious curve. He answered the accusation in her tone.

“I ain’t going for mystery. I just don’t have much to say,” he said. Inga laughed, half-defeat and half-amusement, and he gave in a little to the sound. “You probably guessed I’ve got a price on my head back in the United States. I thought my friend was safe and in the clear when I left ten years ago.”

“Were you bank robbers?” Inga’s voice had a touch of enthusiasm as if imagining the romantic dime novel version of outlaws.

“Sometimes. But we tried not to rob from those who couldn’t afford it. We tried to feed people who were hungry. I don’t know. We tried to balance things out.”

“Your friend might be drawn to the revolution then. If you were idealists…”

“We weren’t,” Arthur snapped. He tapped the reins against the horses’ rumps and pushed the wagon along a little faster. “We were fools. Everyone was.”

“I see,” Inga replied, and something in the way she folded her hands in her lap and allowed him the quiet made him think that she did. After a bit, he tried to open conversation again.

“Would you like to talk about your parents?” 

“Someday. When it hurts less.”

“That’s when I want to talk too.” 

They rode the rest of the way back in companionable silence, an understanding finally reached.

* * *

“It is simple enough. There will always be peasants -- that is in the blood of a people -- but they do not have to be hungry or suffering. A content people will want to be led,” Abraham Reyes spoke to the bottom of his glass of whiskey. Arthur took another long, slow sip of his, a genuine serving of American Jack Daniels, and nearly whispered a grateful prayer. “I will bear the burden of leadership so all other men can be free.”

“Sounds good,” Arthur said. “You have a plan.”

“I do. I am an educated man. This will not be a fools’ revolution.”

“Good. If you’re going to ask people to die for it, it might as well be a good plan.”

Abraham regarded him critically. “To fight for freedom is to live, even if one’s body dies.”

Arthur closed his eyes and drank the rest of his glass. “If you say so.”

“You do not agree.”

“It doesn’t matter. I’ll ride tomorrow, and I don’t plan on dying, so the specifics of what you just said don’t matter too much.”

“You are a funny man, Arthur Morgan. You might be happier if you found yourself a nice tight girl to spend the night with. There are many here in this camp who would consider you.”

“I’m fine.”

“Then take the rest of this bottle of whiskey and leave me to my pleasures. I have written a new poem certain to woo any woman of my choosing.” Abraham laughed and clapped him across the shoulder. “As if my presence and my future as President of this fine country are not inducements enough!” 

Arthur watched him go with quiet relief. This rebel leader was arrogant, self-assured, and sentimental. The combination tied Arthur’s stomach in knots even the whiskey couldn’t settle. He tried anyway, plowing his way through the bottle in the flickering lantern light.

He kicked back in the chair and looked around the house. It must have been built for a family; it was spacious with curving, welcoming doorways throughout. The old bones of this house must miss their purpose, watching this new reality.  _ It wasn’t supposed to be this way _ , they might think.

“Jesus,” Arthur muttered, squinting down at his again empty glass. “You’re getting pretty maudlin, old man.”

But it was too late for any of his speeches to stop it, and his hands had no action in front of them. Grim had been brushed, fed, and settled into the best section of the corral, and his belly was full of stew and whiskey. His guns were clean. 

There was nothing to do but think. The dam broke open.

Dutch had brought John Marston home to a ring of cabins they were inhabiting in backwoods Montana territory when the kid was only twelve. Dutch had marched him right up to Arthur and said, “Keep an eye on him for me, Arthur. I need to speak with Mr. Matthews.”

John had looked up at Arthur with the meanest scowl ever seen on a child. He was skin and bones. Dutch and Hosea had stepped to the front porch of the little cabin.

“They were about to lynch him,” Dutch had justified. Arthur could still remember the skeptical tilt of Hosea’s head as the two talked. “An innocent boy.”

“You just said he had been robbing homesteads,” Hosea corrected.

“All children are innocents, Hosea. You know that.”

John had kicked the side of the table. “Do they think we can’t hear them?”

“They don’t much care,” Arthur said. “Do you think they don’t know that you know you were robbing homesteads and just about got yourself strung up?”

Even as he said it, he disliked the image it brought to mind: a group of grown men fired up to kill this boy.

John shot back angrily. “I don’t need anybody to look out for me. I’m doing just fine on my own.”

But when Arthur looked down, he saw John’s hands trembling at his sides, his mouth a little white around the edges. Arthur tried to think about what had been done for him when he was scared. He had laid his hand on John’s shoulder.

“Sure. But if you want to stay, there’s good people here.”

In that instant, pinpointed forever in his mind, John Marston had become Arthur Morgan’s responsibility. No one ever told him. Dutch never delivered an edict, and Hosea likely had seen it as his own role. But Arthur knew. He taught John how to shoot -- how to really shoot, not just fire a gun and look at a target at the same time -- and how to ride like a man, not a schoolboy hanging onto his daddy’s Thoroughbred.

Somewhere in the mysterious passage of time, John became the man he had always believed he was, the last planes of boyhood disappearing into his face, his shoulders broadening and his last inches of height shooting up. One day, Arthur had been teasing him like a little brother, and the next, he had depended on him as a partner. 

Dutch and Hosea had been so proud of the two of them. They had been so damn proud.

Arthur tilted the last drops into his mouth straight from the bottle before he dragged himself to bed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh Arthur.


	4. The Train Job

“Alright, girl.” 

Arthur patted Grim’s withers as she pranced in nervous irritation. The other riders’ horses stood patiently, a mix of plow horses and family ponies, while Arthur’s mare showed uncharacteristic spunk. He would have been proud of her if he hadn’t been worried she was going to dump him on his ass.

“You’re okay, girl,” he repeated, and this time, her ears swiveled to him. “Easy now. Easy.”

Inga came out to the gathered people. Other women had come -- perhaps to see off husbands, brothers, and lovers -- but she stood apart from them, still not welcome in their circles. Maybe she should let them feel her calloused hands to begin to break down the walls between them. Instead, she approached the white American, another outsider. He hoped she knew she was further marking herself. 

“So you are not an idealist,” Inga teased.

“No. Just a man with a gun.”

“So many idealists are soft men at desks. We need the ones with guns.”

“Whatever you say,” Arthur said, but he smiled back. 

She offered an explanation he hadn’t asked for. “Abraham and I are old friends.”

He waited for more, and she continued, “We were raised together. I attended the church school across from his academy when we were very young. He was always a smart boy.”

“The men say he lived in Europe for a time.”

Inga nodded. “He attended school there as a young man. It was an opportunity even my professor parents had never had.”

“Sounds like he’s been real lucky.”

Extracting the venom from his voice, she shook her head. “He brought that education back to Mexico. He is giving it back to his people.”

“Sure.” 

Abraham Reyes rode up then like a storied general on a noble steed. He marched a line back and forth in front of the riders and well-wishers, surveyed them, and then grinned his pleasure. Once again, Arthur found himself listening to the rhythm of Spanish he didn’t understand. The dismissal came with a wave of Reyes’ arms. The rebels wheeled into motion with whoops and cheers.

Arthur tipped his hat to Inga as he more quietly joined the movement.

As he trotted away, he spared a glance back. Reyes watched his troops go with the stern, resolute face of absolute certainty, and when Inga reached his side, he broke into a genuine smile.

Perhaps she was right about him. Arthur hoped so. 

“The supplies will be well-guarded. Soldiers with machine guns, perhaps.” Fernando wheeled to Arthur’s side, a little quick-footed buckskin beneath him.

“Sure.” Arthur knotted the fingers of his left hand in Grim’s mane and patted the repeater at his side with his right. “You’d better hope I’m not the only good shot.”

“_ Si.” _ Fernando laughed. “I think you will be surprised.”

They galloped past the little hollow of Casa Madrugada and further back across windswept earth. At each strategic point along the train line, they left behind men and horses for the assault. 

Arthur had been assigned the job of outrider, one of the first to take his place alongside the train and take out as many of the soldiers as he could. If he had been a smarter man, he might have feared it for a suicide mission.

Their numbers had shrunken to a group of fifteen, split on opposite sides of the tracks, the first who would contact the train. When its low rumble began, Fernando cried out, _ “Vamos!” _ and they streamed out in different directions, creating a staggered barricade of humans, horses, and explosives. 

The train roared into view, belching black smoke and running full speed. They had to be expecting an ambush to be pushing the engines that hard. All along the train cars, soldiers stood at the ready, rifles a promise, not a threat. 

Arthur clucked to Grim and set her to chasing as the first shots rang out.

He did not slow to shoot as some of the others around him did. He swung around and flicked off three shots in rapid succession, two through the heads of surprised soldiers and one through the shoulder. He followed up with the kill shot within seconds. A throaty whoop from his own throat surprised him. 

Killing would always feel good in the heat of battle, no matter how old or tired one got.

The pop-pop-pop of a Gatling gun alerted him eight cars up the train. He saw the rapid fire saw through a horse and rider, cut down too quickly to cry out. He eased his hands up Grim’s neck, whispered a little loving encouragement to her to keep steady, and tucked their path right up against the train. The pounding metal machine drowned out every other sound. In her shadow, he surged up unseen.

Someone shouted, “Why don’t you get some friends? Even this up a bit!”

Arthur had no idea how the shout made it to his ears through the din of the train, but it froze his fingers on the gun. That hoarse, brash bellow was better known to him than his own voice. He looked to the Gatling, now no more than fifteen feet in front of him.

Even from behind, Arthur recognized him instantly. 

John Marston might look different -- anyone would after a decade -- but all Arthur could see was the familiarity in the set of those shoulders, the slimness of the hips.

Arthur’s voice caught in his throat even as the precious seconds cost another rebel’s life. John recklessly swung the gun along the left side, paused the blast of gunfire as he swung to the fore, and then came to the left. Now, with him facing this side of the train, Arthur could see the face with its trademark scars.

He found his voice.

“Goddamnit, Marston. What the hell are you doing?”

Sadie Adler had once told him they were more ghosts than people. John Marston certainly looked as though he had seen one now. He dropped both hands off the gun and took a shaky step backward, stumbled as though he might fall. Arthur’s hands lurched on the reins as if he could catch him. 

“Arthur?” John called out a thousand questions in a single word.

A bullet whizzed by Arthur’s head and made him grunt in pain. A flash of pain blinded him. When he opened his eyes again, he followed the line of John’s rifle to a headshot two train cars down. It was an incredible shot. 

The other soldiers near John began to shoot in a new direction.

“Shit.” John ran to the edge of the train car. “Arthur!”

Arthur knew the command in that tone. He urged Grim closer and waited for John to jump. The muscle memory, instinct deeper than knowledge, kicked up, and he grabbed for John in mid-air even as John grabbed for him. Together they hauled him to balance over the horse’s hindquarters. She squealed her irritated protest, unused to tandem riders. 

“You ride, I shoot?” John said, already taking aim.

“You know who you’re shooting?” Arthur growled.

“Anyone shooting at you.”

It had been a long time since Arthur had ridden with someone whose philosophy was that simple. 

  


* * *

“You want me to believe this _ hijo de puta _ had no choice but to shoot us?” Fernando said. He narrowed his dark eyes. Around them, men unloaded supplies from the captured train. Arthur waved at a fly buzzing at his bloody ear, sheared by a too-close bullet, and nodded. His fist still clenched Grim’s reins tight in the other hand.

“Sure. One man can’t take on the Mexican Army,” Arthur said, already compiling the list of reasons Fernando owed him favors and goodwill in case he decided to put a bullet in John. 

Behind him, he felt John dismount, and his blood froze in his veins. Of all the foolish damn things John didn't need to be doing right now, arguing his own case was one of them. 

“I’m here on U.S. government business. I needed information from Escalera.” John held up both hands, a placating gesture, but his thumbs wiggled almost imperceptibly as if planning their own action. 

“Your government is no friend to the rebels,” Fernando said. 

“They’re no friend to me either.”

They stared each other down, and finally, Fernando blinked first. “We’ll see what Reyes says.”

Arthur released the breath he had been holding as the people around them mounted up and rode away, anger simmering under their compliant expressions. He watched until the supply-laden wagons rumbled away and left him standing under a purpling sky and emerging stars. In the quiet, he found himself foolishly afraid to look back, afraid to find himself alone. 

“I thought you was dead,” John said quietly, making himself real once more. Arthur turned to him, adjusted his own hat on his head, and shrugged.

“Nearly was a lot of the time. You got a horse somewhere we need to find?”

“Jesus.” John shot him a look of disgust. “That’s all you got to say to me?”

Every coward knows it. Arthur was no exception. He had no words in his simple arsenal for a moment like this, a reunion never meant to happen this side of the grave. When they left each other last, neither of them should have lived. It was a craggy mountainside with two men caught in the middle of two sides, both of which wanted them dead. Arthur had hoped he could buy John time, get him out, but he hadn’t really believed it. 

Yet here he was. Here they both were.

“Well, do you?” Arthur repeated.

John growled low in the back of his throat, some bit of profanity mostly kept to himself, before answering.

“Yeah. I’ve got a horse stabled out at Casa Madrugada.”

“Let’s go then.” Arthur checked the handkerchief he had been holding on his ear. No fresh blood. He stuffed it in his pocket and mounted up. He held out his arm for John to grab, but John pulled himself up on his own. They cantered in silence so full that it threatened to explode. 

Arthur actually appreciated the dirty, holey town walls for giving them purpose again.

“Paddock’s around the right side,” John said. Arthur didn’t bother to tell him he already knew that.

Once they had pulled up and he had dismounted, John offered the teenage stablehand a folded wad of bills. The hand shook his head and said something in Spanish, accompanied it with a laugh and an eyebrow waggle. 

“_ Si, senor?” _ He asked with glee. John shrugged a big, wide-armed shrug, and a little hint of a cocky grin came to his face.

“Which one?” 

Arthur watched with amazement as the stablehand showed him around to a paddock on the far right. A whirling dervish of a black colt danced and darted inside. John uncoiled his lasso from his belt and hopped the fence. The colt squared up rather than run, and John chuckled, low and easy. 

“There you go, big fella. That’s a boy.” He swung the rope loosely in a circle, his eyes steady on the horse. When he finally sent it out, it moved so quickly and so straight Arthur almost didn’t see it, but when it tightened, the horse reared back and screeched. 

“No need for all that. Hush now. Hush.” John kept up the meaningless soothing as he grabbed mane and hurtled onto the colt’s back. The twisting, writhing bucking made Arthur’s stomach churn just watching it. He had never been one for horse breaking. Long, slow hours spent with carrots and kindness had always been his way. But John never laid spurs into the colt, never jerked at his mouth. He just held on tight and talked his way through it until finally, the horse settled into an easy trot.

John dismounted. He looked at Arthur, hesitated, and then went ahead and made a joke. “I think he probably just wanted to see me get dumped on my ass this time, but it doesn’t matter. Now we’re square.”

Arthur reached for his wit to joke back, but nothing came. “You’ve gotten good at that.”

“Yeah,” John replied. He scratched the back of his neck. “I’m a piss-poor rancher, but I figured out I could ride better than most.”

He put his fingers to his lips and whistled that unique two-note trill. A big head popped up in the neighboring corral. Familiarity itched at the back of Arthur’s mind, even though he surely had never seen John’s horse before. He hadn’t seen the man himself in more than a decade, and in those final moments, Old Boy and Trouble had been shot out from beneath them. 

“Damn fine horse,” Arthur said. He tilted his head. Something about the smooth gold coat and intelligent blue eyes on that horse reminded him of one he had known before.

“He’s getting older now. I wouldn’t have brought him with me, but I wasn’t sure what would happen if I left the stubborn cuss.” John saddled and bridled while he spoke. “Buell’s not good with… well, just about anybody.”

“Buell.” Arthur sputtered out a half-laugh. “There’s no way that can be…”

“Hamish Sinclair’s horse. He died a couple years back, gutted by a boar. It weren’t pretty.”

“No. Guess it weren’t. Damn.” Arthur thought of the twinkle in the old veteran’s eyes. “How’d you meet him?”

Now John looked a little sheepish and sad as if remembering something he had not thought about in a long time. He took his time answering the question, checking Buell’s girth one more time and mounting up. He waited to lie until they were trotting side by side in the direction of Agave Viejo.

“Just ran into him somewhere. Got to talking and figured out we both knew you. I think that’s the only reason he let me go hunting with him.”

“Sure.” Arthur didn’t push it. 

* * *

Agave Viejo roared with life and energy. The music greeted them first, homemade instruments and jubilant voices. Their losses had been few, and any sadness had been left for another day. Arthur and John pulled up the horses a distance away, both staring at the noisy camp.

“Let’s wait until tomorrow,” Arthur said. John nodded.

They trotted until they reached a flat, wide clearing. John pitched his tent and unrolled his bedding while Arthur started a fire. He stoked it until the flames became a cozy blaze. When Arthur took a seat and reached into his satchel, John grunted.

“Don’t you dare pull out that book,” John said. He sucked in a long breath as if bracing himself. “We have to start somewhere.”

“Yeah.” Arthur sighed. “Yeah. What the hell are you doing, Marston? Where’s Abigail and Jack?”

“I don’t know.” John looked down at his hands as if the answers were written on his palms. “The government took them, and I haven’t been able to find them.”

“The hell does that mean?”

John explained. He told the story simply without extra words or embellishment. Arthur listened, but some part of his focus dedicated itself to memorizing this new version of John. His eyes had crow’s feet at the corners, his face a new fullness along the cheeks and jawline. Somehow the angry young man had become middle-aged. That could only mean somewhere along the way, Arthur had gotten old. He pulled a bottle of Kentucky Bourbon out of his bag and passed it to John.

“So until I do what they want, I don’t think I’ll see either of them again.” John gulped down two big mouthfuls.

“What’s the order?”

“Bring in Bill Williamson and Javier Escuella.” John met his gaze squarely, a challenge his eyes. “Government’s cleaning up their most wanted list.”

“And you’re helping them?” Arthur growled. He expected John to flinch, the way he always had when facing disapproval from the older man, but nothing changed in John’s face.

“I don’t owe you an explanation. It’s them or me, and it might as well be them.”

Arthur struggled for words. “They were your brothers.”

“That was a long time ago. The last time we was together, they were walking away with the man who gunned down Ms. Grimshaw,” John said. “They’re no brothers of mine.”

Arthur remembered it too well, the stand-off in those final awful moments, the gargle of Susan choking on her own blood alone on the ground. He had always believed there could be no one Dutch loved more than Hosea and Susan Grimshaw. That had been the moment he finally, truly, decided there was no one Dutch loved more than himself.

“Last time I saw Bill, he got in a lucky shot that nearly killed me because I was too busy pleading to shoot first. That won’t happen again. I won’t make my son an orphan and my wife a widow over Bill Williamson.”

In spite of the soundness of the logic, Arthur disagreed. He couldn’t put it into words that made sense to himself, let alone John, but he didn’t want to live in that world. Perhaps Dutch’s vision had never existed, but some of the best people he had ever known had died for it. Hosea did not die so that the young man he taught to fish could be taken down by the scruffy street urchin he taught to read. 

Arthur lit a cigarette and took a long puff. John took it as a sign he could change the subject.

“Your turn, Morgan. How the hell are you alive?”

“By not being dead,” Arthur replied. A pregnant pause stretched out, and he did not fill it. There was no story to his survival, no dramatics. It was just the boring tale of a man not quite able to die but never getting lucky enough to really live either.

“That’s it? I talked until my jaw hurts, and that’s all you’re gonna say?”

Arthur shook his head. “No. I would like to talk about how we’re going to keep the rebels from shooting you on sight when you stroll into camp tomorrow. I might also fancy a conversation about how you plan to find Bill and Javier. It’s making a needle in a haystack look like child’s play.”

“I already told you…” John started, but Arthur held up his hand.

“But I don’t want to talk about any of that right now. Right now, I want to eat something and drink too much and sleep all night. I’ve been pretty busy lately looking for you, and I’m tired.” Arthur turned away from the stare between them, full of unanswered questions and unexpressed hopes, and rummaged in his bag for salted beef and an apple. 

John startled. “You were looking for me?”

“You always got to talk in questions?” Arthur shot back. He found the salted beef and bit off a chunk. John held out his hand, and Arthur passed it over to him. John took his own big bite and hastily followed it up with a second. “Sure I was looking for you. That’s how I found you. Somehow you’ve gotten your name in a lot of mouths.”

“I made a bit of a name for myself up in New Austin.” John had the decency to look sheepish, and the twist at the left corner of his mouth made Arthur soften back up. 

“Apparently.” He tossed John an apple, and they both munched contentedly, salt beef passed back and forth, apples crunched down to their cores. Arthur sucked a seed out and spit it about three feet to their right. John nudged Arthur’s shoulder, worked up some spit in his mouth, and spit his about six inches further.

The challenge did not need to be uttered. In the next hour, they plowed through a bottle and a half of Guarma rum and every one of the half dozen apples in Arthur’s satchel. As they became drunker and sloppier, the simple act of spitting became elaborate with lines drawn in the sand by boot toes and disqualifications based on improper form.

“Jesus, you crossed that line by a mile,” Arthur drawled after John beat him yet again. “You’re such a goddamn cheater.”

“You’re drunk.” John giggled, raspy and low in his throat. They talked over each other, and Arthur reached out a hand hopefully to make John stop swaying. He caught his shoulder but found the ground itself still unsteady. He chuckled.

“So’re you.”

“I gotta piss.” John wiped the back of his hand across his face somewhere between his mouth and his nose. “But I’m holdin’ you up.”

“Go ahead,” Arthur said. “I’ve got this.”

He watched John walk a few steps from the fire and the tent, but his eyelids were so heavy, so dark. He yawned and leaned back until his legs buckled out from under him. 

“Oof,” he muttered. “Sorry.”

The ground did not seem to need his apology, but instead, was so still and smooth he could not imagine standing back up. He closed his eyes and stretched out. The hum of night-time bugs and the soft whoosh of wind tickled his ears, and he smiled halfway to sleep. John collapsed on the ground beside him with a grunt of pain suggesting he was not as young as he once was.

“Arthur?” John lost control of his tongue, rolled out thirty r’s in place of two. 

“Yeah?” Arthur tried to push his eyelids open but found it impossible. The rum in his stomach sloshed pleasantly from side to side as he turned toward his friend. Thoughts fluttered through his head, bats awakened from their slumber, but each one flew too fast for him to catch. He snorted and snuggled his face closer to the dirt. Such soft dirt. He barely heard John’s voice scratch out the next words.

“I missed you.” 

If Arthur had not been exhausted, pinned to the ground by a quart of rum and days of poor sleep, he would have told John the same thing. If he had not been drunk as a skunk, he would have remembered this in the morning.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know what you're thinking... "He finds him in Chapter 4? You self-indulgent fiend!"
> 
> Yes. I am self-indulgent. I can slow burn, but I cannot be expected to not have John for more than 3 chapters.


	5. Riding Out

Arthur had always been a man who valued doing. Dirty hands and competence were the only languages he knew how to offer. 

Yesterday, seeing John had thrown him off his axis. All of his memories of the younger man were of a follower, a secondary figure in the pageant of Arthur’s life. Hell, Arthur had even outfathered him with his own kid back in the day. So seeing a John Marston cockily climb aboard a bucking bronc and shoot men between the eyes at a dead gallop had given him a stomach ache he couldn’t explain.

But morning light set it right. 

When Arthur woke up, his skull had contracted so tight around his brain that he couldn’t think. His temples throbbed, and pressure behind his eye sockets made his dry, painful eyes water. He hadn’t had that much to drink in many years.

But beside him, John Marston looked worse. His body lay at odd angles, a knee sprawled to the left, both arms to the right, his mouth boorishly open over a muddy puddle of drool.

“The hell is wrong with us?” Arthur mused to the universe. 

He drank all the water left in his canteen in two long pulls. Then he set up his percolator and ground coffee. If he closed his eyes and breathed in the fumes, he could almost pretend his alcohol-soaked body wasn’t planning to vomit. It was almost a lovely morning. 

He dragged himself to the horses and fed them oats from the bottom of his satchel. Grim accepted hers gratefully, chuffing against his hair, and he accepted the equine kiss with a few murmured compliments. Buell snatched his suspiciously and backstepped to enjoy them a ways back.

“We used to do alright, you and me, boy,” Arthur informed him. He earned a hearty, derisive snort that made him chuckle. “But you always were a stubborn cuss.”

He grabbed his bow from his belongings and made his way out across the desert plain just far enough for nature to start making sounds again. In his youth, he had always been a clumsy hunter, crashing through the forest in hopes of scaring something out and putting a bullet through it. It had been 1899 that had taught him how to hunt. When the tension of bad decisions and moral crisis stretched him to his limits, he had disappeared into the woods with Charles’ instructions and Hosea’s map. There he had learned to be still. 

Squatting down, he waited until he had a clear shot on a flock of wrens. The motion of the pull and release brought down two cleanly. The third arrow whizzed through the air without touching a target. Rather than continue, he granted himself clemency and made his way back to clean, dress, and cook the little corpses over the fire.

John lay motionless until Arthur nudged him with his foot. 

“Wake up, sunshine,” he said. John rolled onto his side, groaned, and then squinted up through bleary eyes. “There’s meat and coffee right here. Some of us men can sleep off a little rum faster than others.”

“Yeah, yeah.” John stretched. “Pass me a cup.”

They shared breakfast with old ease newly found. John yawned every few minutes, glancing sheepishly at Arthur, who carefully hid his own morning-after pain. 

“I haven’t slept like that in a long time,” John said. Arthur started to form a sarcastic reply but it caught in his throat at the sincerity in his friend’s face. Perhaps Arthur had not been the only one struggling with the weight of being alone. 

Now he struggled with something new: an inability to make words out of his feelings. John has spilled his guts on the ground between them, but Arthur couldn’t bring himself to say anything at all. How could he ever explain to anyone the hopelessness he had carried up that mountain ten years ago? In one instant, he had laid down his life for everything he valued, everyone he loved. 

But no one had taken it. 

Instead, he had lived on, ripped apart by the unknown. In the early weeks, he had woken up from rare sleep in icy fear that the others were dead. John Marston’s lifeless body with wide, blank eyes had been his nightmare companion, but its counterpoint had never taken such concrete shape. He had never been able to visit a living John in his dreams.

He wanted to ask about Abigail and Jack. He wanted to ask about Charles and Sadie and Tilly. 

To ask about Dutch. 

And in all of that, he wanted to spill the parts of himself he had no words for, so that John could know he had not only been looking for him for these past few weeks but rather for all the years they had been apart. 

“We should ride to Agave Viejo to speak to Reyes.” Arthur stood up. 

“I’ll follow you.”

They unpacked and made their way to the rebel camp together. 

  
  


* * *

“John Marston, you ask to be welcomed here because you need our help to find two men,” Abraham Reyes turned his pause into reticence. “But this is a land of blood and opportunity. Your friend here rode with us though we had no information to offer him yet.”

“Reyes,” Arthur began, ready to defend John and downplay his own actions. 

John cut him off. “Does Javier Escuella ride with the rebels?”

“Will you ride for us without knowing?” The steel in Reyes’ eyes flashed. 

The two men stared each other down while Arthur watched, leaned against the doorframe, hands tucked under his armpits. He had dressed deliberately for this meeting, bandolier cinched tight and full loadout on his back, two crisscrossing long arms marking his lethality. He wanted Reyes to know that the man who asked polite questions around camp and rode alongside strangers had a dog in this fight. 

But it was John who looked over at him, met his gaze with dark brown eyes, and then turned back to Reyes. Arthur knew the fire behind those eyes. 

“Yes.”

Reyes bared that feral grin. “I want a man broken out of El Presidio.”

Arthur guffawed in the back of his throat. His first instinct was to say it can’t be done. He had a unique perspective from which to say that. Sisika State Penitentiary was small potatoes next to an old fortress with cannons buttressed high on its thick walls. 

“Sure, and I want a pile of gold and no more troubles for the rest of my days,” Arthur said. John shot him a look.

“We can do that.” 

“His name will be known to you both. He was once a great American gunslinger, or so the stories have made true. Landon Ricketts.” 

Both American men jolted. “What’s he doing in Mexico?” Arthur said. John offered a variation of the same question at the same time.

“Perhaps he meant to live out a fantasy retirement with warm sun and beautiful women.” Reyes waved his arms wide as if both elements of Mexican life were obvious. “But he has been a part of the revolution. He carries the broken and the damned across the border in his wagon. Or he did before Allende’s men arrested him a few days ago. I have just gotten the word that he is in El Presidio. The cowards dared not risk anything else, for they know a friend of the Mexican people is under the protection of Abraham Reyes.”

“I’m sure they’re quaking in their boots,” John muttered. He raised his voice to respond more congenially to Reyes’ chilly expression. “We’ll go get him. How many men do we get?”

“I heard you were real American cowboys,” Reyes said. 

It wasn’t the answer Arthur wanted.

  
  


* * *

Inga sent them away with saddlebags full of dried meats and hard cheeses and a kiss on Arthur’s cheek that made John tease him for the better part of the day. They made up the worst plans in the history of plans, ones that made snake oil wagons and hot air balloons seem brilliant, and they belly laughed over these stories they had never heard from one another. Each man embellished the funniest elements of his tale, careful to tread lightly around the painful parts, the parts where good people died and suffered violent fates.

By nightfall, they had found their way to a town near El Presidio, a little hamlet in the shadows of the prison. The little houses, terracotta with open windows, lined the dusty street, and at its end, like a beacon, shone a brightly lit building that had to have a bar. Humans were humans anywhere.

“We could try to get a room here. Listen around a little,” Arthur suggested. 

“As long as I don’t have to drink rum.” 

The bar had tables inside and outside with lanterns shining on every table. Musicians had created a makeshift dance floor out of empty space, and they strummed out melodies that had toes tapping. Arthur and John ordered food, though neither of them knew exactly what it was, and two whiskeys before parking themselves at a table on the patio. Arthur had paused an extra moment to order one of the two rooms the place had to offer; the other one seemed to be reserved for call girls and their strings of customers.

One of those girls sashayed along the dance floor now, tugging at the belt of a bashful-looking vaquero. As she giggled and tugged, she palmed a billfold. Arthur remembered fondly many wonderful women he had known over the years who could pull that exact move.

“I’ve seen a lot of them, y’know.” John wiped beans from the back of his mouth with his hand. Arthur was too startled to be a smartass, for he knew who John meant.

He struggled for a word and only came up with “Where?”

“All over.” John shrugged. “Some of them are doing okay. Least they were, a couple of years ago.”

As if he could read Arthur’s loss for words, he kept talking, “Mary-Beth’s a writer now, real fine romances. Abigail made me buy one as soon as we knew, and Jack read it to all of us. Jack didn’t think too much of it, but Abigail and me thought Mary-Beth had done a real good job.”

Arthur took a drink as little tendrils of sweet fire unfurled in his chest. John’s cadence picked up as if he could tell.

“And Pearson is running the General Store in Rhodes of all places. Gone and gotten himself a legitimate business and married. Tilly’s a fine lady. She’s married to a lawyer and has a family and everything. Swanson’s got a church in New York. Think he stayed clean if letters from Tilly are all true. She’s kept in touch with him. And Charles and Sadie... ”

John paused here, a smile appearing on his mouth. “Hell, I couldn’t have built my ranch without them. Uncle too.”

Arthur hated to ask any questions and spoil the images flooding into his mind. His fingers itched to pull out his journal to capture them. Without knowing the Marston ranch, he would draw it in stark, strong lines, stick-built against man and God. It would have a wraparound porch. He would draw Charles on it first, off to the side, one hand against the railing as if to hold everything up, and Sadie would be next, on the ground, not too close to all the domestic bliss. He might have to make a rocking chair for Uncle -- now that was a thought -- but he wouldn’t draw Abigail or Jack or John. No, they would be inside together because he wouldn’t risk ruining that with big, clumsy hands on a worn-down pencil.

“We were so busy worrying about who we ought to be killing that I didn’t ask much about that,” Arthur said finally. “Tell me about your ranch.”

“It’s out at Beecher’s Hope, not too far from Blackwater. It’s a pretty piece of land I paid too much for, but it’s got a house and sheep, space enough for cattle when the time comes. Abigail picked it out from a newspaper scrap when we were working on a farm, and I bought it for her.”

“I bet she’s tickled pink being a rancher’s wife.”

John nodded. “It’s what she always wanted. She’s settled in one place, and Jack gets to be softer than I might like. He wants to be a lawyer.” 

“Shit.” Arthur chuckled. “A Marston going out for the legal profession.”

John laughed too, a low grunt that stayed tight at the corners of his mouth. “He dreams of nonsense like we used to. His nonsense just happens to have pens instead of pistols.”

“He’ll be alright.” Arthur leaned back in his chair, tipped his head up to peek at the clouds in the night sky. “I think I’ll go get the horses set for the night. I’ll be back.”

“I’ll be here.”

Arthur took care of Buell and Grim with gentle hands, currying them in slow, soothing circles and working snarls out of their tails. Neither horse fussed over his ministrations, and when he had finished and slipped a sugar cube to each, he sat down on an overturned barrel and pulled out his journal. He sketched Grim, her head cocked, her breath visible in the night air, and then he wrote.

_ Can’t believe John is a rancher. He has sheep. I think that is what I fought for all those years ago. It does me good to hear about the others, but it was John I think I needed to get out the most. He was the only one of us Dutch hadn’t already taken everything from. I think I did good. _

Arthur underlined the last word firmly and drew a little hasty doodle of a sheep. He heard the footsteps, knew they were John’s, and didn’t look up.

“My Spanish isn’t very good, but I think I’d have no trouble getting us company tonight if we wanted it,” John said. He lit up a cigarette and took a long drag. “I think we’d get an itch no amount of scrubbing would scratch though.”

“I’ll pass.” 

“That’s what I told them. What are you drawing?”

“Nothing. Just writing down some ideas before I forget them.”

“Y’know, if you wanted that to work on me, you should have kept your shit when you decided to die on a mountain.” A hard edge ran beneath his words in spite of their levity. “All that time when I was a kid and thought you were writing secret plans you wouldn’t show me, but you were really drawing rabbits.”

“And sometimes horses.” Arthur turned the book to give John just enough time to spot the sketch of Grim and then put it away in his bag. In many outlaw circles, this conversation would have been ribbing or even merciless mockery, but they had grown up educated. Anyone illiterate in the Van Der Linde Gang had been that way by choice. 

“It’s good,” John said simply.

“Secret plans would be better right now. Tomorrow we’re sneaking into a fortress.”

“You’ve done it before. More than once. Eagle Flies and I both owed you our lives for those.”

“I was younger then.” Arthur preferred the oversimplification to pointing out how unlikely a reprise was. “So were you. We need a Hosea plan right about now.”

“He always had the best ones.”

They smiled.

  
  


* * *

“Jesus Christ.” 

Arthur jolted, teeth rattling in his head. In the first instant of panic, he had no idea where he was, only that a face loomed over him, and he fumbled for his gun.

“I think I’d rather you shot me than you keep on like that.” The face became John Marston’s, and his voice dripped with exhaustion. He had both hands on Arthur’s shoulders from shaking him awake.

“What?” Arthur pushed the question out through a haze of sleep. 

“You sound like a goddamn freight train.”

“Snoring?”

“Yes.” John let go of his shoulders and sent him back down with a thump. 

“What time is it?” 

“I don’t know. The middle of the night.”

“You’ve made it halfway. Just go back to sleep.”

“I haven’t made it halfway,” John argued. “I’ve suffered in silence.”

“Do that again.” 

Arthur rolled over into the warmth of the thin mattress and thinner pillow and buried his face. He heard John lay back down on the floor, groaning, and he tried to drift off again. But his dreamless, easy sleep had been interrupted, and now it fled from him like sand through spread fingers. He sighed into the sour blanket and stood up. Several joints popped with rickety cracks as he knelt down and then eased to his side on the floor.

“You used to be easier company,” Arthur teased gruffly. Then he jerked his chin toward the bed. “Take it.”

John startled. “No.”

The flat line of his voice surprised Arthur. Over the years, they had bandied back and forth over who got the bed hundreds of times. Arthur had never given it up, of course, because he was the oldest and the stubbornest, but the arguments had been legendary. Once Hosea, who swore that a bedroll on the ground was the only answer for back pain anyway, had fired a warning shot into the air just to shut them up. Another time they had started wrestling half-heartedly over the only available bed and ended up covered in bruises. Arthur had sported a black eye for the next week but had come away the winner.

“I don’t mind.” 

“I…” John tried to come up with a response but blinked owlishly instead.

“Try to get some sleep. I’m already here.” Arthur grabbed the blanket off of John and cozied it over himself. “I’m good.”

He pressed his eyelids shut and ignored the fact that John wasn’t moving. The bed was there when Marston decided he needed it, so Arthur fell back asleep easily. John’s breathing sounded like family and home. He had missed it. He had missed him. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to everyone taking the time to hit the kudos button, write a comment, or subscribe! It's so appreciated.


	6. The Escape

Arthur woke first in the morning again, an unbroken habit, to find John still on the floor. His lean body had curled in on itself, his knees drawing toward his chest, his arms tucked against his body. 

“Idiot,” Arthur muttered as he pulled the blanket off himself and shook it over John. He tucked the top edge of it gently up over his shoulders. He repeated the word without knowing to which of them he was referring. “Idiot.”

He had grown up in the shadow of two men completely devoted to one another. As a young man, he had not wished for a wife and children, though in his time he had experienced that pain. No, his outlaw’s dream had not been for what Dutch had with Annabelle or Hosea had with Bessie. That had been no more enviable than a fast horse or a big score. Colm O’Driscoll had those often enough, as did his motley boys. 

But Dutch and Hosea had possessed something tangible he had never seen anywhere else, before or since. They belonged to each other.

Arthur had never had a poet’s soul, so he had never been able to put it into words, but he had always known he wanted it. The way the world closed in around the two of them as they cooked up the next big scheme had seemed almost magical. No one else had existed when those two sat down at the little table together, picking up the same whiskey bottle and passing it back and forth. They had argued over books and maps, philosophies and trajectories, but always together, never apart. When the camp numbers grew until they were big enough to be called a gang, Dutch delivered his orders with Hosea at his elbow, just out of reach but close enough he never needed to look to see if someone had his back.

To this day, Arthur sometimes wondered if Dutch could have held onto the scraps of his sanity if Hosea had lived. 

Somewhere along the broken line of his youth, Arthur had wished it all into existence for himself. John Marston had come barreling into his life with all the stubborn affectation of a kid who thought he was a man, and whether by chance or necessity, they became inseparable. By the time John reached manhood, Arthur thought he had found it, whatever the hell it was.

When John had ridden out of camp one day and not come back for a year, a stupid, foolish, unspoken dream had been broken, and Arthur had raged like any man betrayed. 

It was all so long ago, but right here, in this little room, it felt like yesterday. Arthur wiggled the fingers of his right hand, felt the crackle of pain through the overused joints, just to remind himself he wasn’t in his thirties anymore, and that John Marston choosing to stay on the floor rather than take his bed meant nothing more than him being too tired to move.

He pulled out his journal and the scrap paper boasting a warrant for Landon Ricketts. He read it over, contemplating the many ways today could go unspeakably wrong, until John groaned himself awake.

“Get up.” Arthur nudged at him with his toe. “Let’s go do something illegal.”

“To break an unjust law is the American way,” John muttered in grouchy homage to the man they once loved. 

He rolled to his feet and stretched. The blanket tumbled off of him into a pile on the floor, and Arthur folded it up. They ate quick canned goods out of their bags, made their way to the horses, and checked their weaponry. 

They trotted to the cliffs alongside El Presidio and staked out to observe its architecture and routines from a bird’s eye view. After the early hours of intense focus and unnecessary whispers, they began to bicker.

“You want to just waltz in there?” Arthur goaded.

“No, damn it. I’m just saying that it looks looser than we thought. We’ve seen God knows how many deliveries come in over the last hour.”

“It might be delivery hour. I think it’s optimistic to hope they don’t have a schedule and that any old wagon with a smiling American driver can cruise in at any time.”

“Why go in over the walls and risk getting injured just to get us in?”

“Because then we’ll know how to get  _ out _ without a shootout. How the hell do we get back out in your plan?”

“It wasn’t a plan yet. It was just an idea.” John adjusted his hat on his head and looked back to the fortress. “I was trying to see if you wanted to make it a plan, you jackass.”

“Shit. Did I hurt your feelings?” Arthur ducked his head to hide his laugh. “I sure didn’t mean to do that. Sure, we can talk about how to make an elaborate plan involving a wagon and a driver and supplies when we don’t have a wagon and--”

“Shut up.”

Arthur chuckled and lifted his binoculars to his eyes again. The fortress had been built right into the geography of the cliffs over the Rio Grande. If someone was dedicated enough to climb in from the side, the way in would be easy, and the way out, harder but doable. Arthur judged the distances. He was likely tall enough to pull himself out, and if Landon Ricketts was in good enough shape to walk, he could just be boosted out and over. 

That assumed a lot going right. It assumed this whole thing wasn’t a colossally foolish idea.

“You want to hit it while there’s still light out or wait until nightfall?” Arthur asked.

“Oh, now you want my opinion?”

“If you can give it in the next couple seconds, sure.”

“Night. It’ll be easier to sneak in the dark.”

“Okay. That means we’ve got a little time.”

John cut cards out from his saddlebag, and they played poker for pennies. Arthur liked seeing John at cards again, even as informally as this. Marston had always had the best poker face in the whole gang. He could check an unsuspecting person right into an all-in bid at the last moment and then play it so cool it seemed to be a fluke. Every time they had sat down at the table, Arthur had been the only one who could hang with him, and even he ended up losing it all sometimes. 

“You must be good at Liar’s Dice. That’s everywhere down here,” Arthur said. He narrowed his eyes to read John’s face and then drew his hand back to toss down his cards. “Fold.”

“Yeah.” John laid out a five high he had bluffed up. He grinned. “I’m okay.”

They played until the daylight burned its way into dusky darkness. The funeral pall fell over then, the inevitable contemplative quiet of preparing for danger. John opted for his pistol, a double-barreled shotgun, and a sniper rifle. Arthur kept it simple, a repeater on his back, a revolver at his side, and a bag full of poison throwing knives at the ready. A bow was better for stealth, but his hands weren’t what they used to be. 

Arthur flexed his fingers again and cleared his throat to get John’s attention.

“Listen, if something goes south in here,” he began.

“No.” John shook his head. “Don’t even start.”

“If something goes south, you get out, and don’t worry about me or Landon Ricketts. You know the deal. You’ve got a family.”

“Yeah. And you’re part of it, so shut the hell up.” He held out his hand. “Give me your journal. I need paper. You’ve just reminded me of something I need to write down in case I die in there.”

Arthur opened his mouth to say no, but even in the darkness, the seriousness on John’s face stopped him. He reached into his saddlebag and handed the book over. 

He didn’t bother to tell John not to read it; it was too dark, and he had kicked the greasy teenager’s ass once a long time ago for sneaking peeks. Instead, he watched curiously as John bent his head over the page. He dragged the pencil across the page several times in succession, and Arthur realized he was making lines for himself to write on, just like Arthur had done for him when he was a kid learning how.

“Make sure each letter lands right there. It’s like a horse’s gallop. It’s got to be grounded,” Arthur had once explained to the young man. John had gritted his teeth and tried to make it perfect to avoid the ribbing of his three extremely literate mentors. Arthur watched him write with the same intensity now.

“Done.” John handed the journal back. “Let’s go.”

Arthur and John handled the cliffside climb easily, even in their worn boots. The old rocks were smooth and sloping, without the treacherous crags of the American West. They had been in the Rockies before where a misstep from the only viable path meant certain death. Here they picked their way along their options. Some of these well-worn pathways suggested both escapees and patrols had used these trails over the years. As they neared the edge of the fortress, Arthur touched John’s shoulder. He jolted, but Arthur just gave him a stern look, an unspoken reminder to be careful, not stupid, not reckless.

They made their way in and over the wall together before splitting up as previously discussed: Arthur downstairs, John upstairs. If things went south, John was to get out and use his sniper rifle to give Arthur the space he needed to do the same.

As he slipped down a spiraling set of side stairs, Arthur listened to the guards. An animated card game had the same sounds in all settings; a general chorus of groans and jeers rose up as someone obviously won big to the detriment of others. 

Arthur kept one hand on the wall to follow the trajectory he had studied earlier. Most guards with keys had turned left as they came down any stairs. There must be cells near the front gate. It was weak tactically, but he had seen it before. Many sheriffs preferred a similar layout where they could see everything from a desk at the back.

Unless the sheriff was a good shot, those had been the easiest breakouts, nothing between them and the door once the cell door was unlocked. Unfortunately here, even if he found Landon Ricketts in one of these front cells, the front doors were no use. They were guarded from the outside.

He heard footsteps too close for comfort and swung his head side to side, looking for something better than shadows to hide in. A large barrel of gunpowder was his best cover.

The young guard strolling by mumbled to himself and swung a gaggle of keys on the end of a leather strap. 

“My lucky day, kid,” Arthur whispered. He lined his walk up with the guard, took two synced steps behind him and then wrapped his arms around the windpipe. He pulled back, careful to avoid the snap he would have relished as a younger man. The struggling of the smaller man was like the flop of a fish on a line; Arthur waited until it stopped. 

Then he remembered that there was no telling how long the kid would be out. Him waking up would be enough to derail everyone. Arthur held him there, suspended between his two choices, and then grunted and dropped him to the ground still breathing. 

Guess he had better just move fast. 

He pushed the guard behind the barrel and shoved a rag into the mouth, jamming his fingers back until the cloth partially filled the throat. That would slow him down. Arthur wiggled his jaw in sympathy as he snagged the keys and continued.

The inhabitants of the cells saw him before his eyes adjusted to the deeper darkness. Cajoling and wheedling whispered through the air, clear even to a man who didn’t speak the language. He blinked away the blindness and scanned the faces in the cells, anywhere from 15 to 20 people, all clamoring for the ticket out. 

None of them looked old enough or white enough to be Landon Ricketts, but one person stood alone at the back of the cell. His lank hair hung around his thin, scruffy face, and he stood with an unnatural hunch, shielding his left side with a tight, bent arm. Arthur’s eyes widened.

“ _ Ay, Dios mio. _ ” Realization dawned on the other face too. The thin, weak voice barely matched memory.

“Javier.” Arthur didn’t know whether he meant the name as a greeting or a question.

  
  


* * *

  
  


“Are they rebels?” Arthur finally asked, motioning to the other inmates. Javier shrugged one shoulder, the other side of his body tight and stiff.

“Some of them. Some of them are murderers and rapists and thieves.”

“Which are you?” 

“I don’t know, Arthur. Which are you?” 

They each wore tattered shreds of the trust they had once shared. It had to be Arthur who blinked first -- he knew that -- for Javier believed him to be the traitor. It hadn’t been Javier who had changed. If Arthur had ever trusted him, he could still trust him now. “The most loyal one of all,” they used to say about him.

“Can you get them to fight? If I open these cells, will they take the fort?”

“Or die trying,” Javier said. “The soldiers treat us worse than dogs. These men will be hungry for revenge.”

“Do it.” 

Arthur listened to Javier speak urgent, hurried commands to the assembled men. Whatever pain he was in deepened his voice. When Arthur turned the key in the locks, the men flooded out en masse, a war cry on their lips. 

“Shit.” Arthur remembered who would have no idea what was happening. “John.”

“C’mon, Javier,” he opted for an audible voice this time. He held out his revolver.

Javier lurched a few rickety steps forward to take it. “Lead the way.”

In the chaos, no one looked to the side stairs. The cries of “ _ Viva la revolucion!” _ and the cracks of gunfire from the center of the fortress made Arthur mutter a fruitless prayer that John had possessed the good sense to stay upstairs. 

Halfway up the stairs, John, coming down, nearly slammed into him. “What the hell…” 

So much for getting himself out and not looking back. John’s eyes became as big as saucers when he saw Javier, and Arthur grabbed him and shoved him preemptively. “Let’s  _ go. _ ”

They made for the wall, and Arthur saw a man standing on top of it, a wrinkled, shrunken version of the gunslinger who’d been on cigarette cards when he was a boy. A thrill lit up Arthur’s spine. 

Then an explosion roared, and the blazing heat and deafening noise hit him from behind. He ran like hell.

  
  


* * *

On the other side of adrenaline, there is always a reckoning. This time, it came on the dusty flatlands on the other side of Diez Coronas’ cliffs, with horses lathered and heaving, and four men who could barely hear over the thudding pulses in their veins. John looked at Javier, eyes still wide and unbelieving. Then he looked to Arthur, who tried to look neutral, tried to master the cool enforcer stance that had once come so naturally. Arthur shook his head.

“You boys might be the sloppiest rescue party I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen quite a few in my time,” Landon Ricketts spoke with heavy authority and an old man’s cigarette-soaked rasp. “But I thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” Arthur said. He never took his eyes off John. “You can thank Reyes too. He sent us.”

“Ah, so you’ve met the fearless leader then. Tell me. What do you think of him?” Landon took off his boot and shook something out of it.

“He’s got a big job on his hands,” Arthur said. Neither John nor Javier looked away from each other, and Arthur felt their impending clash like distant thunder in his bones. 

“It’s been a long time, John,” Javier finally spoke. “You look well.”

“You don’t,” John said. 

Javier chuckled. His drawn, pale face barely moved, and his eyes were mirthless. “I got shot and never found the bullet.”

“That’s too bad.”

Arthur shuddered at the careless disregard in John’s voice. “Marston, stop it.” 

Javier shuffled forward, but even the venom in his voice could not hide his wince. “I already know why he’s in Mexico. This  _ puta _ is hunting his brothers, his family.”

“You’re not my family,” John said. “You left me for dead. It’d be mercy for me to do the same right now, but I need to take you in. It’s you or me, old friend.”

“You always were a stupid man. Too ignorant to see that you always made choices. It was always someone else’s doing. It was Micah or it was Dutch or it was the law. It was never John Marston.” 

Javier’s low hiss had more strength than his body. He wobbled on his feet, and Arthur lunged to catch him just as he toppled forward. No death throes marked the fall; it was just the collapse of a badly hurt man after the high of adrenaline wore off.

John shrugged. “Least he’ll be easy to take in now.” 

“Only buzzards feed on their own,” Landon said. He spat on the ground. “You should hope to be better than that, boy.”

“I ain’t above nothing.” John’s voice was ice cold. “I ain’t had that kind of life.”

Once, when Arthur’s Copper had just been alive, the damn dog had gotten into Pearson’s onions, eaten a mess of them, and fallen ill. The dog had shaken and writhed and vomited all over camp. Arthur had sat in front of him with his own mug full of water, whispering pleas to the hound to just drink a little something. Everyone had taken a wide berth around the tent. But then in the middle of the second night, when Copper had gotten too weak to stand, John had shown up and begged Arthur to get a little sleep.

“I’ll watch over him. Won’t let anything happen without waking you. You won’t do him any good if you die first.”

Somehow he had talked Arthur into laying down, and later, in the quiet, believing himself alone, John had prayed aloud for the dog.

“I know praying for animals when I’ve spent a life killing men doesn’t make much sense, but I’m asking you for help now. Dutch and Hosea might say otherwise, but he’s theirs too. Hosea sneaks and lets him lick from his bowl, and Mrs. Grimshaw calls him the cleanest little mutt she’s ever seen. This dog’s important to Arthur, and I love him.”

Arthur had lost all the air in his lungs at that soft, whispered, ambiguous prayer. He had not fallen asleep but instead listened to every moment of John giving Copper water and coaxing him to lick salt venison and try to walk a little. Arthur had wondered every moment just who John had meant he loved.

By morning, Copper was a little better. Within days, he was romping like a puppy again.

The man who prayed over a sick dog might now let a brother die like one. Arthur couldn’t bear it.

“Let’s go back to Agave Viejo. Get him some rest and some medical attention. No one’s making decisions in the middle of the night, not even us,” Arthur said. 

He loaded Javier onto Grim’s broad back and trotted away. The steady hoofbeats behind him reassured him John was still there. 

“I don’t feel much like I’ve been rescued, under the circumstances,” Landon groused.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Landon, Javier, John, and Arthur? Man, this chapter was fun to write.
> 
> Your comments and kudos make me SO HAPPY. I get excited over each one!


	7. Bedside Vigil

There was nothing quite like the public, rousing praise a leader could offer. 

Unlike the softer, gentler wink of a comrade, this praise hung in the air afterward as a motivator for everyone. 

Reyes beat the drum of their success as if they were conquering heroes but took care not to undercut his own involvement -- “Together we have freed the prisoners of El Presidio, one people, rebels arm in arm with true allies, united under the banner of a common leader.” 

The party rollicked for hours, an excuse for Bacchanalian exploits. John never joined it, riding away without a word, and Arthur did not stay. When he first yawned into his sleeve, Reyes offered him a room in the manor, adjacent to Javier’s. He accepted and slunk away.

In the illumination of candlelight and small Catholic relics, Javier could have been his corpse on display at a funeral. Only the beads of feverish sweat proved him alive. A woman slid past Arthur into the room to flit around Javier like a benevolent moth, dabbing a wet cloth against his forehead, turning her hand palm-side up against his cheek, and then disappearing as rapidly as she appeared.

The conversations about his care had been vague, unable to penetrate the language barrier. No speaker had the right mix of English, Spanish, and medical training to even ask the questions, let alone answer them. 

They had sent for both a doctor and a priest. Looking at Javier now, Arthur wondered which one would still be needed by morning.

“It’s me,” Arthur said needlessly as he took a seat beside him. The body did not move, no twitch of recognition and only the faintest signs of life. “I’m still here.”

He stayed, expecting John to show up too, though he wasn’t sure what he expected John to do if he did.

In his journal, he sketched Javier from memory, on the bank of a forest stream tossing in a line. Even in recreation, he turned the mouth into a stern line. He scribbled out the words: _ I wonder when he last went fishing. _

He must have fallen asleep for a time, slumped in the wooden chair, for when Javier woke up, slick with feverish sweat, Arthur jolted.

“Arthur?” His tongue fumbled roughly. Arthur lifted the glass of water to his lips, and he gulped. Javier blinked several times, unable to clear away the cloudy confusion from his eyes. “They got Hosea. _Todos nos vamos a perder sin él.” _

Arthur muttered, “Hosea…” 

“How long was I out? _ Lo siento_, I am seasick.” Javier moaned, his voice fading out to nothing. 

Arthur’s hands dampened, a chill racing down his spine. All these years later, sick and in pain, Javier was on a storm-tossed ship after the bank robbery. How many nights afterward, even back in Lemoyne, had Arthur endured the ground swaying beneath him in his sleep? He knew these nightmares, but they had never followed him out of his dreams.

Lies were the only possible comfort to be offered now, but they stuck in Arthur’s throat.

“Just have some water. There’s a doctor on the way,” he managed.

“Where’s Dutch?” 

Arthur inhaled around the lead weights in his lungs and lifted his face to the ceiling. It offered no answers.

“I don’t know.”

Javier closed his sick eyes. With a few ragged breaths, he disappeared from consciousness again. 

Shaken, Arthur hurried outside. He smoked three cigarettes in a row, lighting the next before the smoke cleared. When he hit the box against the heel of his hand a fourth time, nothing came out.

“Shit,” he muttered. 

Ghosts. How many people out there bore scars and ran from ghosts because of Dutch van der Linde? Yet in there, quivering and aching and marinating in his own sweat, Javier still asked for him. When at his weakest and most vulnerable, Javier found himself back in a place where the only thing he had to know for himself was how to find Dutch. Dutch would have the answers. Dutch would save them all. 

Arthur scrubbed his hands over his face.

Then he went back in and held the bedside vigil a brother deserved, no matter the years or distance between. When he heard the footsteps in the hall, he turned to see Landon Ricketts in the doorway. Here was a man who should be dead a hundred times over but had gotten old enough to gnarl like old tree roots. 

“How’s your friend?” Ricketts nodded toward Javier.

“Dying, I reckon.” Saying it aloud was a surprising relief. 

“Better here in a soft bed than on the floor in a prison cell.”

“I suppose.” 

“I can sit with him if you’d like to go looking for your partner.”

Arthur shook his head. “I’m going to stay here. You’re still welcome.”

“Don’t mind if I do.” Ricketts eased into the chair. “Poor bastard. A slow bullet’s the worst way to die.”

What might have seemed like sympathetic small talk was more than that. It was an opening, a clear invitation to campfire storytelling and outlandish tales. Arthur knew his responsibility now was to either ask Ricketts when he had seen it before or grunt agreeably to end the conversation. He asked, but while Ricketts talked, he didn’t listen.

He just kept thinking of how there were worse ways to die and thinking of Hosea, whose death had been mere hours ago for Javier. 

Javier, who didn’t even know he was dying, couldn’t even be present for his own goodbyes, because he was so trapped in a moment in time none of them had ever really escaped.

“It’s customary to listen to the wisdom of your elders, boy,” Ricketts snapped. 

“I ain’t heard any wisdom yet,” Arthur grunted. He earned himself a snort of surprise attempting to mask itself as derision. 

“Fair enough,” Ricketts admitted defeat. “You boys must have a hell of a story.”

“No. It’s sad and it’s stupid and it’s chasing us down.”

“That’s the way of the outlaw in the 20th century. That life is dead. It used to be if your face got on a Wanted poster in a town, you tore it down and rode to another one. Now the world’s collapsed in on itself.”

Arthur nodded. “There’s wisdom I needed about twenty years ago. You’re a little late.”

Ricketts coughed, low and creaky in his chest. When the glimpse into his own mortality had passed, he said, “I usually am.” 

This time, Arthur asked him to tell the story again, and this time, he listened. Ricketts had lost his brother to a bullet stuck in his gut, unable to be extracted but unwilling to kill him quickly. They had been fleeing from bounty hunters on horseback when the bullet finally dropped him out of his saddle. Ricketts had ridden on and never looked back.

"Don't raise me that look. Him and me had already worked it out. Knowing how to die's part of gunslinging."

Arthur told the story of his worst experience with a bullet that wouldn't quit: being kidnapped by Colm O'Driscoll. He did a decent job stringing the words together, but he knew he couldn't make Ricketts see what that had been. He had been hanging from his ankles in a dank basement, woozy from blood loss, coughing in bad, moldy air, and so terrified of being the reason everyone he loved rode into a trap he couldn't see straight. He'd have killed a million O'Driscolls with his bare hands to get out of there. He'd have slaughtered a virgin on a pagan altar and taken the immortal consequences rather than let everyone he loved be lost.

Only Dutch had never given the order to go out after him. Only that desperation and fear he had felt for everyone else could have been better spent on himself. 

The stories kept coming. Ricketts and Arthur sat together, passing words back and forth like a whiskey bottle at a campfire, until the priest arrived.

Arthur wished it had been the doctor first, but he still stepped out so Javier could be given his last rites.

* * *

Perhaps it should have surprised him to find John sitting at his campsite at the edge of everything, but it didn’t. He sat on an overturned crate, poking at the sticks and sending up a spray of sparks. In the dancing firelight, his eyes burned black as pitch above their dark circles. 

“Is he alive?”

“Barely.”

Arthur weighed out his options. If he said just the right thing, he might be able to make John see another way. He was still trying out words in his head when John spoke, staring straight ahead.

“I wish God would take it out of my hands. The son of a bitch is about to die anyway.”

A quiver ran under the words. Arthur squatted down, much to the protest of his knees, to look right at him. For a split second, John’s haunted eyes broke through Arthur’s concern for Javier. They looked like the man who had raised him, fire and pain mixed together. John had been Dutch’s boy, but Arthur didn’t like seeing it plain on his face like that.

“You don’t mean that.”

John’s mouth twisted. “I wish I didn’t. It’s been a long time since you knew me. I might not have turned out like you wanted.”

Nothing had ever turned out like Arthur wanted.

“You’re fine, Marston,” he said. He reached down to pinch a weed from the ground, lifted it to examine its roots: bone-dry and in need of rain. 

“I don’t feel it. Haven’t for a long time,” John said, more to himself than to Arthur. “I have to get them back. I have no choice.”

Arthur ignored this since he had nothing to offer, but he glanced up at the candlelight vigil on the second floor of the manor house. Javier might be dead now for all they knew. This whole conversation could hinge on something already lost. 

It also hinged on something else, something small heard in John’s explanation. Maybe John had misunderstood everything here. It wasn’t as if Arthur had managed to say any of the things tumbling around in his fool head over the last few days. Maybe John thought Arthur, riding with the Mexican revolution, had just intended to check in on him, make sure he was okay, and then disappear again. Arthur hadn’t even thought it through himself; maybe that had been the original plan.

But now, having laid eyes on John again, Arthur wasn’t leaving him. This mission was theirs now.

“You ought to just tell them he died escaping El Presidio before you could find him. Tell ‘em the same thing happened with Bill Williamson. Shit, tell them nothing at all, and we’ll do whatever we have to do. There can only be so many places the federal government holds women and children.”

John’s eyes widened, his mouth tilted at the corner with sudden, soft gratitude. The surprise there made Arthur stand back up to hide the rush of warmth in his chest and cheeks. Better to leave John alone with his heart on his sleeve than to have the pair of them looking at each other like that. 

“Jesus, you fool. Did you think I was going to let you see this thing through on your own? You’ll get yourself killed. Or worse.” 

John stood up too as if he, too, could shake off what Arthur had seen in his face.

“Okay.” He cleared his throat. The next one came out even surer, sturdier. “Okay. I’m going to ride out, see if I can find some game when the sun starts coming up.”

“You make some decisions. I’ll see to Javier.”

* * *

Saying goodbye to Mexico was far easier than Arthur liked. It had been his home for a long time, but he had never put down a single root, never made a friend he couldn’t part with. 

Javier survived the surgery. Within days, his eyes were strong and his tongue sharp, even within a bed-ridden body. Full recovery. That was what the optimistic physician had proclaimed. 

Arthur talked with him more than once, pushed through the mistrust to memories of good old days. They even managed to laugh over fishing on the Lannahechee River and pulling a battered John Marston up the side of a snowy mountain, moments that bordered the ones they would never talk about. 

Javier didn’t thank Arthur for El Presidio or this bed in a rebel town; that, to Arthur, was the best of it all, that after all these years, Javier could simply think _ This is what we do._ Arthur believed it, too. If the situation had been reversed, Javier would have seen him out of crisis too.

“See you in the next life, brother,” Javier said, easing to his feet.

“Be strong.” 

Before they had ridden out, while Arthur talked to Inga and accepted overly flowery gratitude from Reyes, John slipped up to the upper floor of the manor. Arthur was glad about that too.

It embarrassed him how happy he was, riding off into the desert with a faded map and a foolhardy hope that they could find the lost Marstons. But when he looked to his right, there was John, lean and strong and not going anywhere.

He patted Grim’s withers. “Let’s go, girl.” 

**End of Part I**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Heyo, we're headed for a time jump into Part II. Buckle up your spurs, cowfolks. This next chapter is one of my FAVORITES.


	8. New York City

They rode across Mexico and then America too. Every waypoint had a hope pinned on it, a federal building to investigate, a contact to seek out.

But the path itself became so incredibly simple. They would stop for a day and do ranch work, legal and honest, for wages, or they would stay off the grid for a week of travel, eating whatever could be shot or foraged.

In the cold, they shared a bedroll like in their youth, and by the fifth or sixth time, Arthur got control enough of his hammering heart to sleep. He became a master of standing up and adjusting quickly, telling himself that this was just range loneliness and nothing more.

Reyes and the rebels had kept up their bargain, loudly taking credit for killing an American bounty hunter, John Marston, who had come for one of their own. It bought the two outlaws some measure of freedom, even with John’s famous scars.

They chased leads until they finally got the break they were looking for. The federal boys had only held Abigail and Jack Marston a few weeks after John’s demise. 

She had sold the farm, gotten the hell out of Blackwater. 

Way the hell out of Blackwater. 

She was in New York City, and they had an address.

  
  
  
  


_New York City, 1913_

Arthur Morgan stared down his reflection in mild horror. This hotel had smooth, flawless glass in full-length and then some. In a bit of unexpected vanity, he leaned closer to the stranger in the mirror to marvel at him. Unlike scars, appearing overnight and announcing themselves in bloody glory, wrinkles and crow’s feet had snuck in quietly. Now he wondered how long they had been there. 

“You look the same as always,” John replied without looking. His fingers fumbled at the tie at his throat. “Except for the clothes.”

“And the haircut.” Arthur’s hair had an uneven patch on the left side, clipped nearly to the skin thanks to John trying to talk and cut a few days ago.

“I said I was sorry.”

Their train had arrived in New York last night. The city made the old Southern and Western metropolises look like cowtowns, had made the cowtowns look like primitive villages. Even at night, people bustled everywhere, oblivious to the smog and coughing and crowding. The sky above didn’t even have any stars. Arthur sketched about that later in his journal:  _ Man has snuffed out the stars. Wonder if we’ll have the sense to regret it. _

Suitcases in hand, playing well the part of everymen, they had gotten a hotel room with two beds and complimentary breakfast service. Of course, the word complimentary had just been marketing fluff as exhibited by the exorbitant price tag. 

“We could buy a house in Montana for the price of this room,” Arthur had groused. John had opted to ignore this hyperbole.

Now they were dressed in their suits, hats tucked away, boots traded for dress shoes, to go knock on a door they hadn’t found yet. No wonder John had been trying to tie the same tie for five minutes.

“Let me,” Arthur said without bite. He untied the crooked fabric and fixed it. Somehow in the suit, John looked younger than usual. Or perhaps that youth came from the fear ringing his eyes and fidgeting at his fingertips and tapping his toes. He looked like the groom the morning of a shotgun wedding. It had been almost three years since he had seen his wife and child. Not by choice. Not by desire. But still. That absence swelled large between them, a cavernous valley they would have to figure out how to cross.

Arthur knew damn well he shouldn’t be going along on this one. He should wait here in the hotel room with a book until John came back or sent a telegram or whatever would be next. In fact, when they had been talking about suits and trying to blend in, Arthur had half-expected John to ask him to stay out of this. He never had, and now Arthur wavered between thinking he was wanted along or worrying he wasn’t able to take a hint.

“Listen, John,” Arthur began, smoothing the tie down under his fingers. “I know you ain’t seen your family in a long while, and…”

“You’re coming.” John’s voice was flat. “Abigail will want to see you.”

“Sure. But maybe not until you two have seen each other,” Arthur began, but John shook his head. Arthur recognized when the younger man was being cornered into saying something vulnerable, baring more of his fears than he intended, and he gave in. “Okay. It was just a suggestion. I want to come.”

The address had been burned in both of their memories, scribbled in Arthur’s journal, written on the back of envelopes stuffed in John’s bag, each of them terrified of somehow losing the thing they had worked so hard to find. 

They walked in silence to a clean, serviceable brick apartment building, the day so bright and sunshiny it mocked their sobriety. 

“I know what it’s like having ghosts show up.” John nudged Arthur with his elbow.

“She’ll be glad to see you. In my experience, that’s generally the way it is.”

They shared a smile before scaling the interior steps to Apartment 3C. The door had a once-beautiful wreath hanging on it, the flowers wilted and past their prime. John sucked in a deep breath, so Arthur knocked for him before his nerves became contagious. 

Thirty seconds passed. Sixty seconds passed.

And then Abigail Marston opened the apartment door. For the instant, before her face changed, she looked precisely how Arthur remembered her: not a day different, not a whit older or thicker or plainer, all beautiful competence and spitfire. Then she saw who was at her door and smothered a cry behind her hand. 

“John?” His name -- question and greeting and exclamation all at once -- melted into his collar as she swept into his arms. John dropped his face to hers. Arthur looked at the ceiling rather than be blinded by the intimacy of the way their bodies greeted one another. Then in a teary cry, Abigail whispered, “And Arthur?”

Then she was in his arms too, and like all men who have ever loved a woman, he remembered vividly the first time he met her: hands on her hips, bosom on scandalous display, telling the men ain’t none of them had enough money to pay for her company. He had half-wanted to marry her then.

“You’re alive,” she murmured into the kiss on his cheek. “Get in here. Both of you.”

The apartment brimmed with tiny, loving touches. Arthur noted each of them as they walked to a living parlor. It took determination to keep fresh flowers in a vase in the middle of the city and elbow grease for old wood floors to shine like this. No one was biding time in this soft haven; this had been made a home.

A foreboding hole opened in Arthur’s stomach.

“Sit down. Look at you two, all slicked up in suits looking like businessmen. Sit down, sit down. Let me get you…” Abigail was a sudden flutter of nervous energy into the kitchen as they eased onto the yellow and blue couch beside one another. Too late, Arthur realized he should have taken the chair, but as he tried to stand up, John grabbed his knee like a vise. He sat back down. Abigail returned with a cookie jar. “I made them myself.”

Arthur dutifully bit into one. The moist cookie turned to dust in his scratchy throat.

“How are you alive?” Abigail sat in the chair opposite them, wringing her hands together.

They relayed the story honestly and without embellishment. She asked questions about Javier, but a hard edge crept into her tone. She made it clear he had chosen the wrong side of her story. Forgiveness drew from a well long run dry by this point, Arthur supposed.

“I never thought to leave a note or nothing.” Her voice was mournful. “I thought you was dead, John.”

“I know.” John looked around the apartment as if just realizing what he should have asked sooner. “Where’s the boy?”

“He’s at school,” she said. There was no hiding the pride there. “Top of his class, though he’s a year behind the boys his age. He’ll be going to college soon enough.”

“College.” In John Marston’s mouth, the word sounded like another language. He shook his head. “Shit. I’ll be real glad to see him.”

“He’ll be… pleased to see you too.”

Arthur wondered if John hid it well or if he, too, felt the crackle of a coming storm in the air. His arm hair stood on end as he listened to them banter back and forth.

“Well,” he said as he stood up. “I think I’ll go for a walk. Let y’all talk.”

“Arthur, no, wait.” Abigail jumped up to grab his arm. Her wide eyes sent a familiar message:  _ I need your help with John.  _ “John, I have to tell you something.”

“Okay.” 

Her hand on Arthur’s arm trembled. Instinctively, Arthur closed his fingers over it to steady her. The air crackled with unsnapped lightning.

“I’m married,” she said.

It was John who had to go for a walk, just got to his feet and hurried out the door. It fell behind him, still ajar. Arthur closed it for him. 

As he turned back, Abigail had dropped her face into her hands. She wept harder than he had ever seen before.

“Oh Abigail.” Whatever he felt for John right now melted in the force of her anguish. “Come here.”

He held her close while she cried and he wondered if it was fair to pin this on Dutch van der Linde too. Blaming him felt better than any alternatives.

“There, there,” he soothed as if she were a horse who could be calmed so easily. “It’s alright. It’s gonna be alright.”

On the other side of her tears, Abigail smoothed her hair and wiped her face with her apron. Arthur asked no questions. He supposed she understood; they had no business talking about something like this before she and John had. Either the years or the gravity of the news shared had softened her famous temper, for she made no moves to stomp after her husband. Or one of her husbands, so it seemed.

“Shall I get out the dominoes?” She forced a smile.

“I could fancy a game,” he said. 

They played without keeping score, cycling through six rounds before John came back. He walked in without knocking, passed Arthur with eyes that saw nothing but Abigail, and lifted her into his arms.

Arthur saw himself out. 

  
  


* * *

John didn’t come back to the hotel room that night. Eventually, Arthur ate a late dinner at a restaurant down the street, had two whiskeys without cussing too much over the price, and made his way back. 

All the bustle of a city evening barely drew his eye as he walked and tried to figure out what was roiling and aching in his gut. It wasn’t as if Abigail had been his wife or as if he had any hard feelings about her making good, practical decisions. John would be okay, one way or another, however this shook out. He had been through worse than this. All of them had.

In the hotel room, he tried to write something down, just to ease his mind, but no words came out. He sketched the flower wreath from Abigail’s door. He drew one of the flowers falling away.

Finally, he borrowed a farmer’s almanac from the sitting area in the lobby. It was splayed open on his lap when he finally fell asleep a few hours later, having barely managed to remember a thing he’d read.

  
  


* * *

The door clattered open, rattling on its hinges, and Arthur jolted awake. John swayed there, gripping the door frame for stability. Arthur’s first jarring thought was that suddenly, John looked old and haggard. From bridegroom to widower in a single day. Arthur lumbered to his feet to assess the damage. 

“Arthur,” John greeted with a two-finger salute. “Mornin’.”

He was drunk -- the smell of liquor and piss had already made it across the room -- and dirty as hell. No tie, ripped dress shirt, one shoe, and blood all over his knuckles. The pattern of dirt streaks all over him looked familiar, but Arthur couldn’t quite put his finger on what it was.

“Where the hell have you been?” Arthur pulled him inside and shut the door. 

“I found a bar. A good bar.” 

“Looks like you drank most of their supply.”

But Arthur could not maintain his grouchy tone, not when he was relieved John had made it back, not when he was pleased to see him on his feet (at least somewhat) after the blow he had been dealt. He helped John to the edge of the bed. With gentle hands, he peeled John out of jacket and shirt. The extra shoe fell off on its own as John moved.

“I kicked a man’s ass.”

“Good for you, tough guy.”

“But I don’t think he did anything wrong.” John’s voice turned mournful. Arthur whispered a silent prayer to whoever was the Patron Saint of Fools that the person John went after had not been Abigail’s new husband.

“That’s okay. Now hold still.” Arthur had dipped a rag in the washbin. Now he carefully wiped the blood off John’s knuckles, scrubbing until the skin came clean again. He turned the rag to the other side to set to work on John’s face and focused on wiping the dust away from his eyes. Even his eyelids glittered with it.

“Christ.” It came to Arthur in an instant. He knew those marks: they were from someone being dragged. “Did you get hit by a car?”

“Carriage. Horse-drawn.”

“You’re lucky you didn’t break your neck.” 

“Mighta been luckier if I had.”

Arthur gave him enough of a shove to topple him onto the bed. “Sleep it off.”

Already John’s breathing gave way to heavy snores. It should have made him mad. It was careless and stupid, an outlaw in a world made small by new technologies, showing his ass in a big city. But in 1892, John had plowed into Arthur’s room in a Dodge City hotel with $600 hustled from a game of poker and two good-time gals he had been regaling with tall tales. 

That night, John had needed to be put to bed too, his whiskey dick unable to fulfill any of his promises to the ladies present. Arthur had paid them out of the boasted winnings rather than take advantage of their company himself. He remembered exactly how he felt then, looking down at John. 

That whole night he had listened to this same snoring. 

Writing in his journal made it easier. He spun out some words about how everything in his whole life had been changed or lost until he got John back; now he could look at a snoring man, and that was all it took to make everything seem okay again. Then he was so embarrassed, he nearly scribbled them out.

A loose paper fell from his journal as he closed it. It was folded in half, and when he opened it, he saw two scratchy headings. The top half of the page was labeled Abigail in John’s terrible scrawl.

_ If you’re reading this, I must have died breaking into El Presidio but somehow Arthur must have found you and given you this letter. I want you to know that I always did try my best. I never really understood you or Jack. All I really understood was riding horses and shooting, but I think if I had gotten the chance, I could have liked ranching. I am sorry. _

The bottom half was labeled Arthur, but he folded it back up without reading. He had never been opposed to cracking open other people’s letters for a laugh or insight. This time, opening his own somehow seemed worse.

He tucked it away in the journal, pressing it close to the spine so it wouldn’t fall out again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I got it ready early, had the day off, and decided not to wait to post because... well, why not?


	9. Shared Decisions

Abigail found him in the hotel restaurant, drinking coffee and smoking. Arthur only had to look at her eyes to ease the question of who she was looking for. He motioned for her to sit down. She smoothed her fine-looking dress as she did.

“How is he?”

“Bad. But you knew that without asking.”

“He was dead, Arthur.” Her eyes asked him to understand. He nodded encouragingly. “Did he tell you I’d left him before he bought the ranch? He bought it on his own.”

He tilted his head. “No. He didn’t tell me that.”

She blushed pink but kept going. “One day, he would be faking it, pretending he could stand a normal life, and the next day, he’d be the real John Marston again, shooting people. I had finally given up. Until I got word he had bought a ranch, built a cabin and a barn by hand, can you imagine that?”

A little too clearly, the image came to him of John toiling away on a dry, dusty spit of land. He knew from experience what lonely work that was with no one beside you.

“Everything was so good after he went after Micah and we finally had a wedding, but then they showed up at the ranch and said they were after Bill Williamson and needed his help. He had finally gotten settled in this new life, and Jack was starting to talk to him a little, try something besides hiding in his books, and then he was gone, and we was being watched, agents coming by all the time. It was a mess. And then I got the word he was dead somewhere in Mexico.”

“He tried to find you as fast as he could…” She waved a hand to cut him off.

“I’m not blaming him. God, I should have figured out that it could be a lie. But I’d been waiting for word of his death as long as I’d known him. That’s the outlaw’s way, right? Dying young. Everybody else did it. I was just waiting on his turn.”

“Hosea lived a long life.” Arthur had no idea why he would say such a fool thing, but Abigail pounced on it.

“And he died in the street like a dog in front of everyone who loved him,” she hissed back. A few heads of the early morning patrons turned. She smoothed her hair and reached to pour herself a cup of the coffee with shaking hands.

Arthur wished he hadn’t brought those memories bubbling to the surface for either of them. “You’re right.” 

“Wallace is an investment banker.” She exhaled, restrained tears wrapped in a laugh. “He has no idea what we are -- me and Jack. We used the name Roberts. A man in the street a few months ago tried to rob us. Wally was opening his wallet at the same time I pulled a knife out of my sock. You’ve never seen a man look so horrified.”

Privately, Arthur thought a man like that would do well to count his blessings to have a woman like Abigail. This Wallace fellow had caught a shooting star, probably too hot for him to handle and probably undeserved. They looked at one another, undoubtedly understanding more of each other than either would have preferred. She offered no more insight into her new life. Arthur understood that; he had once shielded his time away from the gang, time spent in a quiet cabin with a pretty young woman and a precious baby, the same way. 

“Why did you come to me?” He went ahead and asked the question.

“Well, I couldn’t very well go see John. I’m sure he’s sleeping it off in the bed you put him in,” Abigail said. He opened his mouth, hoping words of defense would come to him, but she cut him off. “I know him too. I came to ask you something.”

“Sure.” 

At this moment, in the softness of her eyes and the tremble at the corner of her mouth, he finally saw past his Abigail to this woman of New York. He knew before she said anything else that she was not leaving her new husband. She wasn’t Abigail Roberts anymore, wasn’t Abigail Marston; he didn’t even know her new last name.

“Will you take care of him?” 

“Abigail…”

“I made a promise before God. For better or for worse. John was never supposed to be alone again.”

“You’re his wife. You’re asking a man to lose his family.”

“That’s why I’m here talking to you. When you were gone, he took your journal and chased down every loose end across the godforsaken country for you. Left me and Jack at home the whole time so he could chase your ghost. I always knew if he had ever had to choose between us and you, it would be you.”

Arthur shook his head. “You’re making yourself crazy, and for what? Something that’s not even real. John never had to make no choices like that.”

“I’m not crazy. I’m seeing perfectly clearly. But I wanted to ask you if you’d stay with him. I always,” she hesitated, “thought you saw things the same way he did.”

After what she had just said, this hung in the air like an accusation. He wanted to refute it, but if there had been no Abigail, no Jack, him and John would have been on that mountain together, destined to live or die as one. Hell, if Arthur hadn’t begged him before God to go, John wouldn’t have left him even knowing he might make a widow of her.

“You always were Dutch and Hosea’s boys.” Her voice was so gentle now, so knowing, that the salted wounds couldn’t even sting. 

“I’m not going anywhere.” It was the best he could do.

“Thank you.”

They stood up, and he pulled her into his arms, rested his chin on top of her head. “I hope you’re happy, Miss Roberts. You and Jack. I wanted you out of that life more than anything else.”

“I know,” she whispered it into his chest, and he almost didn’t hear what she said next, “That’s why you gave us John.”

  


* * *

John missed Abigail by an hour, emerging into the hotel restaurant like a new man. Arthur had joined a game of poker, quietly risking little and watching these cigar-puffing men brag to each other about their travels and their money. He looked back when he heard John’s familiar footfalls.

“What’s the buy-in, gents?” John asked.

“Five dollars, my good sir, and a promise you’ll keep an eye on Jenkins here. He’s a terrible cheat,” one of the men said. John pulled a five out of his wallet and pulled up a chair. 

They both played well. Two of their opponents were idiots, going hard on every hand regardless of what was in it. As always, Arthur thought John folded too often, played too conservatively, but like always, somehow the man would play it just right and walk away with the most money. Even when he tried to play casually, he cleaned a table, and he carefully saw himself out before that could draw too much attention.

Arthur followed a few minutes later to find him outside. He had abandoned the suit for town pants and a button-front shirt, but somehow, without his hat or holsters, he still didn’t look like himself. Arthur knew from the mirror how similarly out of place he looked.

“I can’t breathe here,” John said. 

“I know. Why people choose to live packed in together like this, I don’t know. But I don’t much understand why people are using automobiles for everything nowadays. It’s just a piece of metal on rickety wheels. It ain’t nothing like a horse.”

“It sure can’t take you some of the places we’ve been.”

“Or warn you when an alligator’s about to rise up out of the swamp to take a bite of you,” Arthur said. John laughed. They both stood there, remembering the time Old Boy bolted at a river crossing, John cussing up a storm at nearly being unseated, only to see a bullgator at least fifteen foot long emerging from the muddy water.

“Or eat your coat,” John said. Another memory bubbled up, shared and warm, of Trouble trotting around camp with a new straw-colored scouting jacket in her teeth. 

They let the memories settle between them and around them before John spoke again.

“I’m going to see Abigail this afternoon. Her… er, Wallace will be dining with friends tonight. Jack’ll be with him..”

“Sure.”

“I’m not staying here another night.” His voice was resolute. “And I’m not asking her to come with me.”

“What?”

“This is the life she wanted. She deserves it. So does the boy.” 

“They’re your family,” Arthur said it even though it was a stupid thing to say. Especially knowing what he knew about Abigail after their earlier conversation. 

“And I’m doing what’s best for ‘em.”

“Okay.”

“That’s it? When I ran out on them the first time, you nearly drowned me in the Dakota River. I thought you was never going to forgive me.”

“You ain’t running out on them this time.” Arthur sighed. “I don’t know anymore, John. It all seemed so simple to me back then. I bullied you into marrying her, claiming Jack, because I thought it was the right thing to do. I thought staying was always the answer ‘cause I thought loyalty was that simple. But it ain’t. Hell, maybe if I’da let you run back then, they’d have gotten out before everything fell apart. They might never have had to suffer all the things they did. You might… well, you might have had less heartache too. I don’t know.”

“Staying was the right thing then. You were right,” he paused as if thinking and then confirmed it, “You were.”

“Maybe.”

“I don’t have a plan,” John made it a question. 

“Getting the hell out of this city and going west sounds like a good start.”

Arthur made the arrangements. He packed both suitcases himself, left a note with the hotel clerk that he was at the station in case John somehow forgot, and walked to the station. The ticket clerk chuckled when he bought a ticket for Jersey.

“Why would you want to be anywhere but New York City?” the kid asked. 

Arthur nearly answered him truthfully.

  


* * *

After the train ride and collecting the horses, they rode until civilized darkness became wild once more somewhere along the coastline. They pitched a tent on the rocky beach while the ocean murmured against the shore. 

“Can I count on you not to end up drowning in the damn ocean tonight?” Arthur asked. It was meant to be light, the same joke made a thousand times between them. But this time, John looked at him, his chin stuck out, his eyes glinting.

“I’m a better rider than you now,” John said.

Arthur snorted. “Like hell you are. You’re better at jumping on a bucking colt and hanging on for dear life because I’m too smart to bother with it.”

“I’m a better poker player.”

“Always have been.” 

“I’m most likely a better shot.”

“Not even if I was blind and drunk.”

“So I figure…” John rubbed his hands together. “All I gotta do to be the best, hands down, no question, is learn how to swim.”

“You’re gonna learn how to swim?”

“I’ve gotta if I want to be the best.”

“Sure. Well, alright, then, cowboy, let’s get to it.” Arthur stood up.

“What?”

“The ocean’s calling your name, pal.”

Arthur heckled him until he begrudgingly kicked off his boots and shimmied out of his denim pants. At the water’s edge, they reenacted an old, familiar scene: John, hesitating with water around his ankles, and Arthur boldly leaping in just to swim in cocky, performative circles. In every creek, stream, river, and bayou they had ever visited, they had done this dance.

“It’s cold,” John tried.

“Not really.” Arthur tilted onto his back, letting himself bob in the gentle waves rolling toward the shore. “And it’s about as calm as the ocean is ever going to get. Just admit it. You ain’t ever going to learn to swim, and you ain’t never going to be better than old Arthur. C’mon, you’ll feel better when you get it off your chest.”

John Marston cussed loudly and dove into the water.

They never left the shallows. In the waves, they wrestled like young men, fought both fair and dirty by turns, and never admitted defeat. At one point, John slipped, tumbling in the outgoing current, only to immediately be caught by Arthur and put back on his feet. They shed decades in minutes.

By the time they hauled themselves out of the water onto the gritty sand, they were exhausted, panting, lying side by side on the ground. John groped sideways until his arm dropped across Arthur’s chest. 

“I might have to just sleep right here, just like this,” John groaned.

“I’m not stopping you,” Arthur growled back. “I’m too old for this shit.”

“Not yet,” John mumbled. 

Arthur started to ask him how he was -- though he knew all too well how impossible the question was to answer -- but he wasn’t ready to hear it. Tentatively, he put his hand on John’s, right there on his chest. John didn’t move away.

They stayed like that for a long time.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Your comments and kudos make me so happy! Thank you for taking the time to write out your thoughts. They make my day every time!


	10. Hennigan's Stead

“You want to do _ what? _”

Arthur kicked a tin can down an alleyway to avoid grabbing the other man by the collar and shaking him senseless. John stepped away as if entirely certain what was going through his friend’s head. 

“I didn’t say want. I don’t want to rob a bank. We _ need _money, and we happen to be in a town with a bank full of federal marshal contraband.”

“And likely more armed guards than we’d know what to do with. It would take a whole crew of people without a brain between them to even go in there. It’s suicide.”

They were in a mid-sized Virginia town, veering deep enough into Southern heat and humidity that it brought to mind bogs and Lemoyne. This town had the trappings of modernization hanging around, but most of the people they met kept horses to pull their car out of ditches when needed. The chances that this place was still backwards enough for a single-day, unknown-suspect bank hit were low.

“I cased it yesterday and…”

“Oh, shit, well if you cased it, then we’ve got nothing to worry about.” Arthur jerked him down the next alleyway. A stray cat hissed at them as it darted away. “Have you forgotten that we’re both outlaws with prices on our heads?”

John waved a dismissive hand. “Everyone thinks we’re dead.”

“They won’t if we walk into a bank and yell ‘This is a robbery!’”

“Maybe we won’t use that plan then.” The sarcasm sliced through anything Arthur had ready to retort. He had to admit, the idea had a shine of its own. The last couple weeks, as they burned through the little bit of money they had socked away in their saddlebags, gamboling like bachelors, an old reckless streak had reemerged. 

Suddenly, he had his memories back. It wasn’t that they had ever been gone, but they had been painted over, sketches scribbled over by an artist who could no longer appreciate his creations. These weeks had changed it back. He could remember the thrills of the earlier days, the raucous laughter, the camaraderie, and above nearly everything else, the lightning heat of power when you had money in your hands and plans to use it.

Once, after a bank heist, Arthur had given $1,000 to a woman after he saw her husband punch her in the mouth, told her to use it for a fresh start.

Another time, John had rustled a whole herd of cattle from a land baron in Kansas and distributed a couple extra cows to every family farmer who could use a hand up. He had conned Arthur, Javier, and Bill into helping, four grown men all giggling like fools as they sprinkled cows around the county.

Back then, Dutch had walked around with open hands. Every dollar of his found its way into someone else’s hands. Hosea would shake his head, affectionately indulgent, as Dutch bled them dry for a colored man who had lost a job he really needed or a young man whose daddy was too quick with a belt. That version of Dutch, the one who said “It’s only money, son, and there’s always more,” had been lost to Arthur for a long time.

He remembered him now. He remembered all of it now. Perhaps that was what made him stupid -- the memories -- and not the familiar glint in John’s eyes, kicking up his pulse and buzzing in his veins.

“You want to rob a bank?” Arthur asked it this time, and John seemed to recognize the difference in this question.

John nodded. “I’d say I’m not too evolved for a little revenge on the federal government that hunted me down and took away the life I’d built.”

“Sure.” Arthur nodded back. “I’m in.”

  


* * *

  


Just a few days of planning, a few old fabric scraps sewn into makeshift bandanas, and the classic bait-and-switch of one masked man making a lot of noise and drawing all the attention while the other quietly robbed them blind… and they were bank robbers again. It was the cleanest hit they had ever made, almost as if age really did bring wisdom along with it. 

Now with enough money in their pockets to start seeing a future, John Marston pitched another idea. There was someone else he wanted to go see, wanted to tell he was alive. Would Arthur ride along with him? Arthur said yes, and that night, in his journal, he scribbled out his own question: _ How many times is John going to ask if I’m staying? _

Arthur wondered what it was about his own communications that made John uncertain.

They rode until the rolling hills and cityscapes of the East Coast faded into the west with its thirsty land, hearty plants, and dramatic vistas. Arthur sketched half of every evening, jotting out mementos of the magnitude of landscapes but also of tiny, frail clover leaves and rabbit footprints. Only when it began to hurt his eyes did he switch to watching the stars. They were more beautiful here, somehow, than they had ever been in Mexico. 

Arthur drew John a few times, mixing past and present on the pages of his book. He started with a young John, maybe 19, handsome, fresh-faced and stupid on a horse with no name. On the page beside it, he brought to life John now, scarred, grizzled, thicker. When he finished, his cheeks burned hot. He wiped the sweat off his palms and took a break.

As they trotted into Hennigan’s Stead, John finally shared the story of the woman they were going to meet, a spinster rancher who had saved his life. Arthur supposed owing her John’s life made him predisposed to like her, but still, he was surprised by the warm, instant pleasure he felt upon meeting her. They trotted down the dusty road toward a dilapidated white house and the woman on the porch stood up to stare. 

“Damn. I suppose the local papers will be printing a retraction for that obituary,” she called out, a genuine smile spreading out on her lips. 

“Suppose they will.” John dismounted, and the woman walked straight into his arms. After a brusque moment, she stepped back to survey him. 

“It’s good to see you’re alive, Mr. Marston. I had my hopes.” She cut her eyes to Arthur. “And who is this?”

“Arthur Morgan, ma’am,” Arthur said to spare himself whatever ludicrous alias John would have cooked up for him. Once he had been forced to spend a month as Rex Roman after John had been allowed to use his imagination. He dismounted too, slid Grim’s reins into his left hand, and produced his right.

The woman’s pants had not lied; she shook his hand like a man, skin rough as leather in his. “Bonnie MacFarlane.”

“Nice to meet you.”

“Was there really an obituary?” John asked now. 

“I might have a copy of it for you to read.” Her eyes twinkled. “Now come inside, have a drink, and tell me what you’re doing here.”

John stepped familiarly over a sagging porch step without looking down. Arthur wondered just how long had he been here and just how faithful to Abigail he had been. That loneliness could gnaw pretty badly; he would know.

“So I’m guessing you being alive is a secret I’ll be keeping, hmmm?” Bonnie asked once she had poured everyone a glass of scotch. 

“Yes. The federal government doesn’t collect debts from the dead.”

“They collect it from their families.” Her concern was evident.

“Not something I have to worry about anymore.” John shrugged. “John Marston’s dead, and his wife and son have new last names.”

“Oh Mr. M-- John, I’m sorry.”

“Nothing to be sorry about. Things work out the way they are supposed to,” John said. “How are you?”

“Courting, if you’ll believe it.” 

“I believe it,” John said, a twitch of a smile at the corner of his mouth revealing to Arthur just how much John admired this woman.

“He was a rancher himself until the bank foreclosed on the property. His father had left him a world of debts he couldn’t climb out from under. He showed up here looking for a job and turned out to be a fine worker and a real smart man. You’ll meet him if you stick around any length of time.”

“I was thinking you might need a hand around here with it being calving season.”

“You don’t know a thing about calving.”

“I kept sheep,” John pointed out, a touch defensively, “but if you don’t need us, you don’t need us.”

“I could use you,” Bonnie agreed. “And your bed’s still out there. I don’t have any extras in the bunkhouse though.”

“We’ll be alright,” John said. Bonnie snorted. Arthur had no idea why until later when they stepped into a tiny, stand-alone shed with one bare metal cot in the corner.

“Jesus Christ,” Arthur groused. “And her up there in that big old house by herself. I’m about to go seduce me a rancher just for a mattress and a pillow.”

John gave him a look sour enough to curdle milk. 

  


* * *

  


The ribbing continued well into dinner. Arthur found a willing participant in Bonnie MacFarlane, a woman whose wit kept her tongue wagging. She reminded him very much of Mrs. Sadie Adler, another woman who made him wonder just why it was man’s world out there. If there were a few more of these women, they’d run it better than anyone else he’d ever known. Tonight though, together, they used any intellectual prowess they shared for fun and nipped in at John whenever possible. 

The meal was around a fire, ringed by small cabins. The people talked about babies and aging parents and the almighty thunderstorm from God a couple nights back, and even as the evening got dark and chilly, no one made excuses to slip away. Arthur enjoyed the opportunity to be quiet amidst the chatter of people who were family to each other.

“Did you work with John for the… what was it, the marshals?” Amos asked. Arthur appreciated any man who would be that blunt. 

“No. We’re old friends.” 

Amos nodded then, his voice dipping a little low, the congenial smile replaced by the straight line of someone remembering something. 

“That’s lucky then. You can’t make old friends,” Amos said. He clapped Arthur on the shoulder and walked on. Arthur recognized the burden of a memory when he saw it in someone else’s eyes. 

Someone busted out Liar’s Dice around ten o’clock while someone else roused up betting on rounds of horseshoes. Arthur opted for horseshoes, lost a couple of bucks to men who were the definition of ringers, and then went to bed. He looked for John along the way but saw him off talking to Bonnie. Their heads were bent together, low and serious. 

Again, Arthur wondered if these two had shared more than life stories when they had known one another.

He also wondered why the possibility gnawed at his entrails.

He scrubbed up in the washbasin, rubbed dinner off his teeth, and tried out the metal shelf trying to be a bed. Its creak was more of a high-pitched scream. When he rolled over, it sounded like banshees climbing out from Hell to claim his soul. His nights in jail had been more comfortable, even in the backward cells without beds or blankets.

With a little irritation, he made a blanket bed on the floor. It had been his way of sleeping on the range for weeks now, but it rankled more when done right beside a bed. At least, a bed of sorts. He rubbed his hand on the cold tip of his nose until heat returned. The nights were getting colder. The seasons were turning.

He never fell asleep, not really, not all the way. Instead, he drifted in and out in snatches of rest, waiting for John. His voice came first, wafting in from the doorway of this little place.

“I’ll have to tell him. I just don’t want to,” John said.

“I wouldn’t have thought to tell you except for having read your obituary a time or two. Gave me a name to put with that gang you ran with. And then…”

“And then you met Dutch van der Linde.” 

Arthur’s heart stood stock still, his blood froze in his veins.

“You can imagine my surprise, what with him having had a grand obituary too. Makes me wonder who exactly died in that shootout at the Blackwater Bank.”

“Yeah.” John sounded as weary as Arthur had ever heard. 

“You don’t have to go turning over stones better left unturned. You don’t owe him anything.”

“I wish that were true,” John said. There was a long pause. “Guess I had better get to bed, Miss MacFarlane. There’s work to be done tomorrow.”

“Good night.”

The door quietly squeaked open, and Arthur listened to John’s careful undressing and the patter of his feet. He noted how John walked to the bed, pressed down on it with one hand experimentally, and then eased himself onto the floor. Arthur kept his eyes closed, forced his breathing to stay steady and even. John sighed, long and low, and then stretched out full-length. 

“Jesus,” John murmured into the universe. He rolled over against Arthur.

It wasn’t unusual for them to wake up casually wrapped together, especially in the colder seasons and places. There was no embarrassment here, even when a man stood at attention in the morning and another inevitably noticed. 

This was different. John pressed against him, full-length, his sock feet tucked between Arthur’s, his chin in the hollow between Arthur’s shoulder blades. If his head had not already been spinning from the conversation about Dutch, the sweet heat would have made him dizzy. 

“Night, Arthur,” John mumbled against his back. 

  
  


* * *

  


“Get out of her way,” Arthur growled. “Jesus.”

His agitation had three parts. The first and most obvious one was that he had a pregnant cow dropping her baby out in the middle of the prairie while his cattle-herding partner tried too hard to be helpful. John kept circling around, murmuring concerned statements about a possible breech, as if saying it would suddenly qualify either of them to do something about it.

The second was that they had reached nearly 3 p.m. and John had still not said anything about Dutch. Anticipation crowded his chest, recklessly filling his lungs and making it hard to breathe.

The third part of his irritable mood had to do with last night’s dreams, a blurry familiar, a memory oft-relived in sleep when young Mary Linton skated her hands down his body and into his pants for the first time. But he had the uncomfortable fear that the rough, urgent hands in his dreams last night had not belonged to Mary, that the whiskey-soaked kisses that had tasted so right had not been hers, and that the arousal that awoke him early would not go away because it had not, in fact, been a memory but a hope.

“She’s laboring too long. Over an hour. Something’s wrong.”

“It hasn’t been long enough to worry yet,” Arthur said. “I don’t think.”

“Have you got a lot of experience with birthing?” 

Arthur opted to ignore the sarcasm. “We had our share of births around camp back in the day, but no, wouldn’t call myself an expert.”

“I lost half of the lambs my first year at Beecher’s Hope because there wasn’t enough grazing land for the sheep and the births went bad. Shit, that same year I…” John stopped. “Well, I had a daughter die too. Stillborn.”

This unknown pain, shared so softly, pinched at Arthur’s heart. 

“So you know something is wrong,” Arthur concluded. 

“Yeah. All I can think to do is to have one of us hold her down and one of us reach up there to turn the calf.”

“Okay.” 

When Jack had been born in a hotel in Texas, Arthur had been outside in the hall, rifle in hand to scare away anyone who wanted to kick them out for breaking the rules of the establishment. John had been downstairs in the lobby like any good expectant father, present but not too present. Arthur remembered listening to the grunting, screaming cries and hating like hell the unborn baby putting Abigail through it. No one had asked this kid to be born, no one wanted the burden of a tiny mouth to feed. 

How he had regretted that irritation when Ms. Grimshaw had let him in first, offered to let him hold the tiny bundle before even Dutch, Hosea, or John knew it was over. Jack had been a perfect specimen, ten little fingers, ten little toes, and a scrunched nose, worth every pang to his tired mother.

Birthing this calf was all the grunting and crying, accompanied by heaving and contorting he prayed Abigail had not had to experience. Just when they were about to give up, the calf squirted into the world in a spray of blood and fluid. Arthur cleaned its eyes, mouth, and nose with quick fingers as the heifer began to shift from distressed to angry. They jumped back out of her way just to time to avoid heavy hooves.

John, whose arm had been in up to the elbow, picked up his coat from the ground and used it like a towel. Arthur made a face.

“How long do we wait before we move ‘em?” 

“I figure we can give it like half an hour and still make it back before this becomes cougar country.”

“Sure.” Arthur nodded. “In the meantime, let’s sit down. I didn’t sleep much last couple of nights.”

“Could have been my fault,” John said as he eased onto the ground. Buell approached curiously, nosed at his hat. Arthur produced a carrot from somewhere in his coat pocket, but the testy old gelding took it without lingering for affection.

Arthur knew it was largely John’s fault, though probably not how John meant it. “How so?” 

“It was cold as hell when I got to bed last night. My toes were about to fall off and there you were like a furnace. Hell, I’ll probably do it again tonight. You’ve been holding out on me, Morgan.”

His cough did little to disguise the flush rising in his cheeks, but changing the subject helped. 

“You must have gotten to bed late,” Arthur said, let the words lie open as an invitation.

“Yup.” John leaned back on his hands, scuffed the heel of his boot in the dirt. Arthur eased himself back onto the ground. Damn if it didn’t feel good to lay down here, under the cloudy sky, breathing in nothing but nature and wind, listening to the milling feet and gentle lowing of the cattle. He laid there long enough for time to stop just a little.

“Miss MacFarlane had some news to share with us,” John broke the quiet just before Arthur actually dozed off.

“What’s that?”

“She saw Dutch.” When Arthur didn’t respond, John kept going. “She knew about it from me. At least, sort of. It doesn’t matter. She saw him in Armadillo, a little cow town west of here. She was in the general store getting feed, and the shopkeeper got robbed by a colored man. Apparently he was ranting and raving, losing his mind over it, and Miss MacFarlane piped up with her two cents about nasty men filled with hate. That was when a gentleman who had come in and told her she had a very beautiful outlook on the world and introduced himself, said he lived up near Pleasance House.”

“Let me guess. That was Dutch.”

“Yeah.” John sighed. “I asked her a hundred questions, thinking some answer would prove it otherwise, but that was him. Had to be.”

“You’d know what to ask,” Arthur said numbly.

“She said he didn’t seem well.”

“Sure. Ain’t none of us young anymore.”

“No. She said he seemed sick.”

Arthur sat there and tried to figure out what to feel about this revelation, what action it inspired. He recalled John’s “I wish that were true” last night. Did they still owe Dutch? After everything that happened, were they still beholden to him for clean clothes and literacy and a belief system? Arthur wished the answer had come in one of Dutch’s grandstanding lessons, a coda to the clauses on loyalty and brotherhood, an answer to the question of “When does it end?”

“Oh,” Arthur finally said, unable to unravel more from the swirl of his mind.

“I know Pleasance House,” John said. “I’ve been by there in my travels. It’s a secluded spot.”

“Sure.”

But the question of Dutch might be the wrong question. It might not be about what each of them owed to Dutch personally. Perhaps it was about what they together owed to him, about the collective. God knows for Dutch it had always been about the family. If they did not go through this open door now, it would haunt them, worse than it ever could have haunted them before. Perhaps they could not continue to be this until they had put to rest being sons of Dutch.

“Or maybe I’m just getting in my own head again,” Arthur grumbled under his breath.

“What?” 

Arthur slapped John on the shoulder. “We’ll go check it out. But first, let’s get these cattle back to Miss MacFarlane.”

That night, Arthur wrote three pages in his journal. His hand moved faster than his brain, writing out words he had not yet managed to think, and when he was finished, he had to go back to read them just to try to understand.

  
_ I am afraid to see him again. It’s like he was a spell we were all under for so many years, and I don’t want to be lost again_.


	11. Pleasance House

Fall calving season slipped away quickly, the days getting colder to sync up with the nights. Leaves burned golden yellow before slipping away. The MacFarlanes calved half of their herds in the fall and half in the spring, hedging their bets in this uncertain business. Drew MacFarlane turned out to be an oak of a man, all muscle and burly competence. It gave Arthur a start to realize Drew wasn’t so much older than him, still working so hard for so little, scratching away at debts everyone knew he could never pay back.

Dutch hadn’t been all wrong when he told them the system was designed for men to fail so that it might thrive, the seemingly stronger society nothing but a parasite sucking its life’s blood from the masses. He remembered what an answer that had seemed when he was a boy. 

Only when he was older did he see how the thieves they had been were just another parasite on the common man, an attack they must face on yet another front. 

The indignity of everyday life would have been too painful to bear, except for the work, hard and honest and ever-present. 

At the end of each day, the ranch came together to eat from one pot, gossip about one another, and complain about sore muscles. Thomas would fiddle some nights, everyone kicking up dust, their laugher visible in the cold air. Bonnie danced three songs with her fellow before switching partners. Everyone teased her for the rest of the night. The hard work sewed them all together.

Maybe that was the reason Dutch had lost control at the end; somewhere along the line, he stopped working.

Arthur and John never got bored sitting together with a bottle passed between them and porch wood under their feet. They talked it over in spurts and drabbles, just a few words here and there, until Arthur truly believed the loss of Abigail and Jack could be borne. John missed them, of course, but he had tasted a kind of freedom again, a chance for a life chosen by him, not for him, and it brought him joy. 

One day, in town, John picked up a copy of Leslie Dupont’s latest novel.

“It’s Mary-Beth,” John said. “That’s her pen name.”

They read it aloud in the evenings, passing it back and forth and laughing with its eccentricities. Neither of them ever made fun of it, though. It represented a dream made good, even if that dream meant women marrying fabulously wealthy, marvelously handsome men at every turn.

The colder the night, the less space John and Arthur felt the need to maintain. Every morning now, Arthur woke up to John’s hot, nasty breath at his throat, nuzzled in close enough for the blankets to create a cocoon of heat around them. Sometimes Arthur jumped up straight away. Most of the time, he laid still for a few minutes, ignored all the little thrumming, hopeful thoughts, and just marveled at how far at bay the loneliness was. 

When it was time to move on, Arthur and John accepted handshakes from all the men and two heavily wrapped trail packs from some of the ranch women. Bonnie hugged Arthur first, thanking him for all his work for so little pay. 

“It was my pleasure. I’m grateful for the peace of this place,” he replied honestly. Then he just quietly hoped John would say something stupider in his goodbye and saddled up his horse.

It was only a day’s ride to Pleasance House, but they stretched it out to two, the tension growing in their tightened hands on the reins, their too-quick spurs, their terse commentary to one another.

Neither of them said the word Dutch.

  
  


* * *

  
  


What a scraggly little shack in the middle of nowhere. Arthur hadn’t expected something so tiny, nondescript, the hovel of a person with no options. Pleasance House sat on the top of a craggy hill, overlooked by barren mesas and dried out grasses. Nothing grew tall enough to block the biting wind from a place like that. There wasn’t even a paddock for horses, just a pole stuck in the ground for hitching by the front door.

“Christ. You really think he’d live here?” John asked as they dismounted.

“He lived in a tent for most of his life,” Arthur said, though even he knew how different that had been. 

They shuffled up to the front door as if scared. Arthur knocked, though his instincts told him to run. 

But their fears were for naught. The long seconds passed, and there was no sound from within, so they picked the lock and entered. It would never have occurred to them to just ride away and assume answers could not be found. 

The tiny space had no feminine touches. Its clean, stark lines boasted no decorative hand. On the table, Arthur saw an assortment of bottles, rum and tonics, a jar of dirty water. He lifted one up, turned it over in his hand. John knelt down at a small shelf, lined with books. He held one up for Arthur to see:  _ Field Guide to Prairie Flora and Fauna. _

“There’s no Evelyn Miller,” John said.

“Guess not.” Arthur opened a cupboard. It held nothing but canned goods.

“Did I ever tell you I met him before he died?” 

Arthur hadn’t even known the author had died; he had never been one for the flowery ideas of Mr. Miller, though he had met him outside a government building in Saint Denis once.

“Nope.”

“Yeah. He was a… silly man. Nice. But silly. He didn’t know what he wanted but spent a lifetime telling people what to think.”

“That makes sense.”

They scoured a little harder now, lifting blankets, thumbing through books as if an answer might fall from between two pages. Instead, it emerged when John kicked the edge of the bed in frustration, a bundle of papers tied together with a ribbon. On top, plain as day, was a letter written in Hosea’s simple script. 

Arthur picked it up with quiet reverence. “So he does live here.”

It was a letter from Hosea to Dutch, and though he knew he should not, knew the privacy of people mattered, he and John held it between them and read every word.

_ November 12, 1885 _

_ Dutch, _

_ We just spent three days choosing furniture for the house. Bessie agonized over every decision. I know you will be curious so I will tell you she opted for a lilac print for the couch. The roses were just too garish. She has made the little place beautiful, and I should love it. Everything is so quiet here. Every person wakes up and does the same thing every day with no regard for anything grander. There is no thrill in this town beyond the men drinking themselves to death slowly.  _

_ I wanted this life for her. It was supposed to be an apology for the children I never gave her and all the dreams she gave up, but this life has been chosen too late. What happened to Annabelle is not enough to make me happy here, though I know Bessie is safe now. I cannot tell her how I hate it, and I worry I cannot bear it much longer. _

_ Remind me in your next letter of how beautiful domesticity is. What do your authors say about the freedom of home? My authors write of great mysteries and adventures, grifters and gunslingers. They make me miss our life more than anything else. Reading is no escape for me here. _

_ Tell Arthur not to chase that Mary Gillis anymore. You and I both know she is not enough for him. Tell Javier I am still practicing my Spanish. It is better than yours but still terrible. Tell John to practice his reading and writing every night and make sure he eats greens sometimes. Tell Susan she is getting more beautiful every day even if you do not think so. Take care of everyone, and stay together. _

_ Write soon and often.  _

_ Yours,  _

_ Hosea _

“Hosea had a house?” John’s utterly factual comment made it easy for Arthur to pretend the letter hadn’t been a sucker punch to his guts.

“He got out of the life for a while. It didn’t last.”

They heard the clomp of boots, turning to see Dutch van der Linde with a gun pointed at each of them. His hair had been lopped short, the uneven chop of a man who had cut his own, and had grayed heavily at the temples. One look at the narrow cheeks, sunken in around tired eyes, agreed with Bonnie MacFarlane’s assessment: he was sick. 

Arthur expected a threat from the man holding them at gunpoint.

“You’re dead,” Dutch told them instead. “You’re all dead.”

“Not quite,” John quipped. Arthur wondered at how John could be so blithe, control his voice so easily. But then again, he supposed John had seen Dutch more recently than he had. This man had had less time to grow into a myth in John’s mind.

Dutch tilted his revolver down and shot a hole through the floor at John’s feet. John yelped. 

“What the hell, Dutch?”

“John.” Dutch’s eyes cleared, his voice quavered in his throat. “Arthur. You’re alive.”

He holstered the guns as smoothly as a man twenty years younger and took his letter from Arthur’s hands.

“I’d invite you into my home, but you boys seem to have let yourselves in.” Suddenly his voice was his own, company charm and openness, an old twinkle in his eyes. It turned Arthur’s stomach. “To what do I owe the pleasure of this sudden intrusion?”

Arthur and John looked at one another, bumbling adolescents once again, sons with no answer for their father. Arthur had to speak first; he had always had.

“We heard you was up this way. We had to see for ourselves if you really were still breathing.”

This time, Dutch laughed, low in his chest. It rattled its way out, squeezed past a barely contained wheeze. 

“Not well, I’m afraid,” he said. “Not well at all.”

  
  


* * *

  
  


Tuberculosis. The death rattle. Blacklung. Consumption. The white plague.

Arthur wondered how it had caught up to Dutch van der Linde. Perhaps this had been Hosea’s slow killer whose work was cut short in a Saint Denis street. 

Dutch delivered the news dispassionately and then asked them if they intended to stay for dinner. John answered yes, surprising everyone, and Dutch set him to work chopping up an onion to throw onto the stove with stringy slabs of rabbit. He didn’t speak to Arthur, barely even looked at him, but he went after John with vigor, engaging him as if they were the oldest and dearest of friends. 

They talked through the cooking and the eating and the cleanup. A few times, Arthur considered trying to speak around the tangle in his throat but thought better of it. He could not look at the greyed, tired man across the table and square it with the voice he heard. If he closed his eyes, Dutch was younger than middle-aged, spinning yarns by the campfire. Each time he opened them, he had to relive the snarled, exhausting journey that had aged them all.

John had told him the story of Dutch, quiet as a stone, calm and collected as could be, putting a bullet in Micah Bell on a snowy mountain. His own memories of Micah and Dutch on a mountain meant more to him than some story ever could, especially since this man in front of him had been talking since he walked in.

“Did I ever tell you the story of Colm O’Driscoll sneaking out of an apparel store dressed as a lady of the night?” Dutch asked, eyes on John.

“Nope. Don’t think I ever heard that one.”

“We were in town to hit a stagecoach depot when we saw the ruckus, a whole slew of O’Driscoll boys running out of the tailor like their tails were on fire. Turns out there was a high-priced tailor in that district, a real fine man who dealt in silks and Parisian designs, and word had gotten around that he was… an easy target. He chased them out of his store in pink leather boots with a shotgun. Those boys were so confused, looking for Colm, because they wanted to get out of there when out he comes, strolling out of the tailor in one of the finest bustled gowns you ever did see, and says,” Dutch paused, his old dramatic tell before he did an impression, “‘Pardon me, fellas, would you give a lady a hand?’”

“He was a piece of shit,” John said with a chuckle. “I would have liked to have seen him hung.”

“It’s a rare thing to see a man get what he deserves, and I took great pleasure in it,” Dutch said. He walked over to a snuff box to prepare a pipe. “Son, could I ask you a favor?”

John hesitated. “Maybe.”

“My horse needs to be fed and rubbed down. I would do it, but I fear I’m a little weak on my feet this evening.”

Arthur opened his mouth to volunteer, just to get out of this tiny room filled too full of the unsaid, but John had already stood up.

“Of course. I’ll take care of our horses while I’m at it.”

He disappeared and left Arthur with the heavy silence. Dutch lit his pipe and dragged on it. The smell wasn’t tobacco but something herbal and faintly citrusy. A fit of coughing followed anyway; Dutch wiped his mouth with a handkerchief and balled it up without looking inside.

“Why are  _ you _ here, Arthur?” Dutch asked. 

“John heard you was alive.”

“I know why John is here.” The arrogance in that voice made Arthur want to punch something. “He and I met our crucible on the mountaintop, and I understand him. Better than he understands himself. But why are you here?”

“I don’t rightly know.” Arthur shrugged. He bit down on the inside of his cheek until he tasted blood. “It’s my turn, I suppose. I talked John out of killing Javier, and now he’s talked me out of killing you.”

It was a lie, but Arthur still took satisfaction in the sting of betrayal through Dutch’s eyes. Then the calm that followed shook him unmoored again.

“You better decide how many of the world’s sins you want to pin on me before it’s too late. If I die before you’ve made up your mind about me, you’ll never have peace.” He took another hacking drag on his pipe. 

“You gave me your answer, though,” Dutch continued. “You’re here because John’s here, and you’ll stay if he stays, go if he goes. Arthur Morgan always needed someone to point him in the right direction.”

Arthur walked out of the cabin.

  
  


* * *

  
  


His sigh roared into the cold air, curling out and around him. With a flick of his wrist, Arthur lit his cigarette and doubled the cloud. 

John had his lantern on a ledge outside the shed. In its dim circle of light, he was bent over Grim’s hooves. The little scritch-scratch of the pick made the only noise. When John had finished, he patted her withers, mumbled a few soft nothings only meant for equine ears, and then turned around. 

He jumped as if he had been electrocuted.

“Jesus.” John scrubbed his hands over his face. “Warn a person before you sneak up on them.”

Arthur had no quips at the ready. He sank down onto a stump, tossing the hatchet aside first.

“Whatever he said doesn’t matter,” John said.

Arthur wished to God he could believe that. Instead, Dutch had sized him back up in seconds, summed up the last few years in a neat tidy phrase. It hadn’t been John following Arthur around. No, it had been the other way. From chasing down Abigail and Jack to robbing a bank to working for Bonnie MacFarlane to finding themselves on this godforsaken spit of land with Dutch van der Linde, Arthur had just been following orders. It looked different, sure, but it happened the same way.

Dumb old Morgan couldn’t figure out how to do anything on his own.  _ Always needed someone to point him in the right direction. _

Arthur only realized he hadn’t answered when John squatted in front of him. 

“He’s just a washed up old man who’s come out here to die. Look at that horse over there. That’s a nag. This man rode the finest Arabian horses money could buy even when we didn’t have two pennies to rub together, and that’s a retired plowhorse.”

John kept talking, but Arthur could barely make himself listen. His brain spun and whirred around the truth in Dutch’s words. 

“I’m gonna go,” Arthur said, cutting John off mid-sentence. He eased to his feet, and this time, his voice came out a little stronger. “Yeah, I’ve got to.” 

John stood up too, rattled. “Okay. Let me go say some things to Dutch, and we’ll pack the horses.”

“No.” 

“What?”

“You wanted to come up here to see this thing through, and I have some things I have to do too. It works out.”

“It doesn’t work…” John started.

Arthur interrupted him. “Do you want to leave him?”

He set his hands to work, saddling up Grim. Her side-eyed irritation almost made him smile. 

“C’mon, Arthur, you saw him. He’s confused -- nearly shot us for ghosts -- and sick.”

“I know.”

They stared at each other for a long moment, and John looked away first, kicked his heel against the ground. 

“How long will you be gone?”

“I don’t know. I need to take care of some things.”

“Okay. You’ll come back here when you’re done?”

“Maybe.” Arthur hesitated to make promises he might not be able to keep.

“Or to MacFarlane’s Ranch,” John said firmly. “I’ll go there next.”

“Next,” Arthur mumbled the word. “Sure.”

Arthur mounted up, and John reached over silently to check the girth. It was totally unnecessary -- Arthur had been saddling horses since before John was born -- but Arthur saw it for what it was. 

“Take care of him,” he said to John.

“You make sure you come back.”

Arthur might be a man who needed someone else to think for him, a man with no brains of his own, and no plans for his own life and future, but he had always been the man to whom John Marston had said those words.

Even when he had been at his angriest, his most vile, after John’s return to camp life after his year away, Arthur had always seen John’s head snap up when he came home, relief in his eyes.

John’s goodbye warmed him through even when the night got teeth-chatteringly cold.

  
  



	12. Owanjila

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I edited two chapters at once because I am super busy next week. Hope it's a treat to have two so close together and not an annoyance!

Arthur spent three days in the saloon in Armadillo, buying the occasional drink, sketching in his journal, and talking to strangers. He had always liked working girls, found them tenacious in the face of human stupidity, and smart enough to turn their vulnerabilities into a weapon. One of the girls here, a slim gal with skin dark enough to make life a little hard for her, reminded him of many a fine woman he had known. This morning, she walked over with a cup of coffee and sat down across from him.

“I’ve never known a man to spend so long in a saloon and not get drunk,” Beatrice said.

“I reckon not.” 

“I’ve talked to you. Told you about my Ma and Pa and my sisters running off with husbands before they were even eighteen years old. You haven’t shared much.”

“I reckon not.” But this time, Arthur smiled. He scooted a map toward her. She squinted at it critically. 

“I’ve never been more than fifteen miles outside Armadillo in my whole life. I don’t know where this is.”

“It’s a map of South Dakota. Or at least, the Black Hills. It’s beautiful country out there. Grasslands until you hit mountains on the horizon and lakes better than any mirror.”

“Became a state in 1889. Half a million people call it home,” she said primly, then laughed at his expression. “It’s from the early primer in school.”

“Were you alive when it was the Dakota territory?”

“No, sir.” She laughed again. “Now you’re just going to offend me. I’m only nineteen.”

He shook his head. He’d been older than nineteen back when it was the Dakota territory, a sprawling place of nothing. Of all the places he had been, though, it had made the strongest impression. They had lived in Indian huts up there, old abandoned camps left behind in deportations, and they had stayed a month, living off berries and rabbits. He had read _ Around the World in Eighty Days _ then, Dutch delighting in Phineas Fogg’s adventures, Hosea teasing Arthur for his wanderlust, and Susan scoffing at the whole idea. 

“What’s in South Dakota?” She asked.

“Nothing,” he said. “I was thinking about it. For a homestead.”

“But not anymore?”

“Nope.” He didn’t elaborate on the reasons he had already jotted out on the back of the map. 

_ \-- Too unknown _

_ \-- Too far away _

_ \--Not good for crops? _

“So that’s what the other maps are for?” She pointed to his pile.

“Sure.”

“I wouldn’t want to live there.” She pointed to his map of western New Austin. “They say Tumbleweed’s haunted.”

She looked so serious that Arthur dutifully turned the map over and scratched out _ Haunted? _ on the back.

“Let me know if you need anything?” She stood up, glanced at the other women who were already positioning themselves on the stairs, draped like human decorations on the banister. 

“A cup of coffee?”

“I’m not a waitress,” she scolded, but her expression was soft.

“I’ll double the going rate.”

“That’s charity, and I’ll take it.” The softness became a grin. She flounced off to get it. 

That night, when he settled into his little room above the bar, he listened for any sounds that meant any of the girls might not be alright. In a sudden warm remembrance, he recognized Dutch was the one who had taught him to care, Dutch who had strolled around camp quoting Mary Wollstonecraft for several months after devouring her complete works. 

Arthur had learned how to treat women as a species from Dutch while turning a blind eye to his mentor’s avaricious approach to young, beautiful women. A prime example of “Do as I say, not as I do.” 

The night’s sounds ended up being nothing but giggles and grunts. Arthur slept well.

  
  


* * *

  
  


He had the place picked out: a patch of land west of Lake Owanjila, listed for sale in The Blackwater Ledger. 

_ 10 acres. Arable land. One old barn. Inquiries to Clint Merth. _

In person, it took his breath away. The purple-flowered fields of Big Valley had sprawled out west, replacing tawny yellow grasses with greens, yellows, and purples. From the plateau at the edge of the property, he could see the lake. Beavers labored at its edge, oblivious to their being watched. Strawberry stood close enough to give access to a doctor and a general store but not so close as to provide unwanted visitors.

“Can I do it?” Arthur murmured to the universe. Grim tucked her head down over his shoulder, whuffed in his face. He scratched her ears and set to work.

He spent another four hours walking the property lines before riding to Clint Merth’s address in Strawberry. Clint Merth turned out to be his elderly wife with a revolver, street smart enough not to advertise herself in the paper. She squinted at Arthur from behind bottle-thick glasses and took $200 off the price.

“My husband bought it to give to our children, but our daughter married a lawyer and lives in Chicago and our son isn’t much of a farmer. Now that my Clint is gone, I’m ready to let it go for my next adventure,” she said, patting the crook of Arthur’s arm and handing him the deed. “You build something pretty on it, and always give your horses sugar cubes on Sundays.”

“Yes ma’am,” Arthur agreed. 

With the papers in hand, he couldn’t resist singing a little “Buffalo Gals” on the way to the sawmill.

  
  


* * *

  
  


It was dishonest money planted in good, honest ground. This time, God granted a little mercy to an earthly sinner and let it grow.

Arthur built the frame first, following a blueprint bought with the lumber. It guided him through smashed thumbs, unexpected structural collapses, and the first snowfall. This one was just a dusting, not enough to worry over, but the next might be more treacherous. He peeked in his satchel at what was left of the money, counted it out, and rode back to the Strawberry mill to inquire about renting a room and hiring a crew. He found George and James.

203 days. That was how long it took to build a cabin and repair the old barn, string up property lines and fence in paddocks. 

On Day 23, the snows finally came. Hills formed first, and then became sloping mountains. They were snowed into town for three days and then lost three more carving their way back to the A-frame.

On Day 56, the barn roof caved in, destroying all of their wall repairs. George cussed with creativity that made Arthur blush, and James refused to touch it for a day and a half, finding any excuse to do anything else.

On Day 100, the unknown almost eclipsed the dream. Arthur worried over Dutch, if he was dead, if he was hacking up a lung on the dusty New Austin plains. He worried over and missed John in equal measure. Most of the time, the hard work was enough to keep it at bay until nighttime, but Day 100, he wondered if he shouldn’t just leave the plans with the fellas, pack Grim up, and go looking. 

It wasn’t the plan. But maybe the plan was stupid. 

Maybe the plan risked losing the only person he had ever chased -- across the West through a hundred stupid plans, into an unknown new future with wife and child, against the Mexican army on only the word of chattering fishermen, through the painful turmoil of yet another new beginning.

He stuck it out, though, the ghost of Dutch’s words rattling around in his skull. 

By Day 189, he was more certain of this than anything he had ever done before.

On Day 200, he paid George and James their final wages, shook their hands, and promised to call them if he ever needed help again. 

It took him three days to finish shingling the roof.

“Well, alright then,” he said as he surveyed what he had done, warm pride bubbling in his chest. He tilted his head back to scratch his forehead, lit a cigarette, and watched his finished house stand under the beating sun.

  
  


* * *

  
  


“Well, now I have two mysterious outlaws who ride onto my ranch and scare the new folk,” Bonnie MacFarlane called out. Arthur had seen her riding the fence line of her property only seconds before she saw him, two eagle-eyed outdoorsmen, even if she happened to be a woman.

“I wouldn’t call myself mysterious,” he said. He clucked his tongue against his teeth, and Grim loped over to join Bonnie and her copper-colored pony. 

“I read in the paper the other day that most folks never travel more than 20 miles from where they were born. Does that sound like you?”

“Nope.” Arthur nearly laughed at the idea. He had worn down hundreds of miles under boots and horseshoes. 

“That makes you mysterious. Ride with me? I’ve got some more fencing to check on before I get a glass of whiskey.”

Repairing a few fences hadn’t taken them long, but it was dark by the time they reached the house. Drew MacFarlane shook his hand, the cock of his eyebrow changing his features from friendly to skeptical. Arthur appreciated that. Hiring fancy governesses and teaching his daughter how to work the land had not been the work of a man who wanted to see her fall in with outlaws, reformed or not.

But Bonnie gently shooed her father away with the confidence of a woman no longer under his wing. He retired to the parlor with a book while they went to the lemon yellow kitchen.

Once she had poured them each a glass of whiskey and sloughed out two bowls of cornbread and beans, she cut right to the heart of the matter.

“Where’s John?”

Arthur let the whiskey sear the inside of his mouth before he swallowed. “If he’s not here, I’m guessing Pleasance House.”

“You weren’t there.” Her tone cooled.

“No.” 

She stalled in that woman’s way he had always admired. Between a bite of cornbread, careful chewing, and a slow whiskey wash-down, she made her lack of answer swell to fill the room. He waited her out.

“I don’t think he was looking forward to finding Dutch van der Linde,” she pointed out the obvious. “I wasn’t certain I should tell him what I knew, but with the hints of past history dripping off of him, I didn’t think it was my place to make any choices for him.”

“I went with him to find Dutch. He decided to stay,” Arthur fumbled for the right words. “To see this thing out.”

She understood. “He’s a good man.”

“He can be.”

“Arthur…” She hesitated. “I’ve thought about writing to him, asking him to come work here. He made it seem okay, losing his wife and son like that, but it couldn’t have been.”

New York City’s goodbyes had echoed even here.

“He’s my friend.” Bonnie shrugged away the depth of emotion under those words. 

This time, Arthur finally asked, “You want to tell me why he’s so important to you?”

Her knuckles whitened against her glass of whiskey.

He was gentle. “I’m the only one who’s ever gonna ask.”

“Now there’s a bit of truth I hadn’t thought about before.” She snorted. “You got time for a story that won’t impress a gunslinger like you too much?”

“Sure.”

The story, however, did impress him very much. She had no gift of storytelling, no careful building of tension or slow reveals. Hell, she started at the end and then backtracked clumsily. But he got the lay of it easily enough: she had been kidnapped by a local gang. They had all always hated those kinds of spineless cowards, the ones too scared to rob banks or stagecoaches, the ones who tormented everyday people.

Women who had faced violence often could not speak of it. Before finding herself under Ms. Grimshaw’s sharp-tongued mentorship, Karen Jones slept with a knife in her right hand and a pistol in her left; Arthur never asked why. 

Bonnie laid it out plainly. She had been strung up in the hands of groping cowards, and John had ridden in like a true hero. Shot the rope right off the post. 

“I thought I was going to die. I’d said my piece to God about it that morning, told him just what horseshit it was that He was going to let scum like those men take me from my Daddy and my ranch. John saved my life when no one else could have. I really believe that.”

“I think it makes you even. I recall him telling me you dragged his carcass away from some buzzards on the day you met.”

“It doesn’t.” She wiped away the faintest glimmer of a tear. “He paid us back for that. Money, hard work, heroics. I had already ended up in his debt before he saved my life.”

She stood up and took their empty bowls over to the washbasin.

“I promised him I’d sell him cattle when he got back to his farm. This farm could be his too, in a way, if he wanted to make it home.”

The flare of jealousy in his chest made no sense, for the look on her face held nothing to resent. She wanted to see John taken care of in a world where she feared he might now be alone and worse than on the lam. 

Arthur released the breath he’d been holding. “I’ve been away seeing to that myself.”

He opened his journal and passed it to her. Bonnie did not look surprised, just carefully examined the page in front of her. He watched her fingers trace over the lines of the house he had committed to paper.

“How much land did you buy?”

“Ten acres west of Lake Owanjila.”

“How long did it take you to build the house?”

He opted to round up. “Almost a year.” 

“Does John know?”

“No. But it’s his home too, if he wants it.”

Bonnie closed the journal, rubbed her hand gently along the spine. When she met his gaze, her expression broke open into its smile, wide and open and real. 

“I hope he does,” she said as she took Arthur’s hand. 

Arthur Morgan did not need a blessing, but Bonnie MacFarlane’s filled him from his toes.

  
  


* * *

  
  


Buell munched on hay outside of the Pleasance House shack. The big golden bastard lifted his head to trill an irritated whinny when he saw Grim, who tugged at the reins and nearly unseated Arthur in her gleeful sidestep.

“Easy, girl.” He bit down the foolish smile at the corners of his mouth. 

John stepped through the front door, and Arthur wished he could be like Grim, unrestrained in her pleasure at reuniting with a friend. Instead, he appraised him more carefully. He was shaggy all over with hair and beard both in desperate need of a trim, but his weight was even, his clothes clean. Sturdy, Arthur thought, that was the word to describe the man stepping out to check on his horse.

But the voice caught him off-guard. “Arthur!” 

John came straight into him, a chest to chest collision Arthur had not expected. His heart bounced against his ribcage. _ You came back. _The unspoken words tethered them together, arms wrapped tight, forearm muscles taut as ropes. Impulsively, Arthur brushed his mouth across John’s cheek. The coarse hair scraped at his lips.

“Sure I did,” he replied to something never said aloud.

They stepped apart without acknowledging the rough beauty of being together once more, John brushing traveling dust off Arthur’s coat, Arthur tweaking the grizzly beard. Their words tumbled over one another. Each thing said was so benign as to have been meaningless: questions about weather and traveling time and nothing about where Arthur had been and why he had to go.

“He’s still here,” John said, jerking his head towards the door. “It’s bad.”

“How bad?”

John shuffled his weight from one foot to another. “I’d best let you see for yourself.”

As much as Arthur wished to avoid it, he walked into the cabin. Dutch lay on the bed, under a heavy blanket in spite of the warm day, with red-rimmed eyes and blotchy, angry skin. His cheeks had caved in on themselves. Yet even under the funeral pall of death, the sharp hunger had fallen away. There was wideness and openness on Dutch’s face Arthur hadn’t seen in years, hadn’t even known to miss. 

“Arthur!” The greeting, weak but joyful, startled him. “Good. You’re here. I’ve been wondering where you’d gotten to.”

Dutch held out his hand, waved Arthur closer.

“How did things look?” Dutch asked.

Arthur shook his head, confused.

“That bad, huh?” Dutch sank back against the pillow. He began to wheeze, a thick, wet cough sloshing with liquid. When he caught his breath again, it still popped and hissed in his chest. “Where’s Hosea?”

“What?” Arthur croaked.

“Hosea, son. Wasn’t he with you?”

Cold hands gripped his lungs; Javier, too, had asked for Hosea. 

Arthur said, “Hosea’s dead, Dutch.”

The man who loomed so large in Arthur’s mind, the man who simultaneously tamed him and made him the most feared enforcer in the West, crumpled. Arthur had seen him look like that only once before: the moment he saw Hosea die.

It seemed for Dutch van der Linde, it was happening all over again.

  
  


* * *

  
  


“He’s been like this for a week or so. The doctor in Armadillo has been coming out here. He thinks it’s the fever causing him to forget,” John said. “He doesn’t have much longer.”

“Jesus,” Arthur repeated for the sixth time in very few minutes. 

“Doc says to keep him still and try not to worry him.” The pointed tone made it clear that reiterating Hosea’s tragic death did not match those instructions. “He can’t move much now. He’s just been pissing blood in the pot under the bed. But he still reads a little. He has letters from Hosea that go back thirty years.”

John laughed mirthlessly. “Sometimes that really confuses him because he thinks it’s 1879, and he’s got letters marching past that. Doesn’t always know who I am. He’ll ask about you or Ms. Grimshaw or Javier too.”

Arthur waited through the pause.

“Sometimes he asks about me. I think when he does that, he’s looking for a scrawny kid with a perfect complexion.” He rubbed at his scars absently. “I guess I’m doing the right thing by him.”

No one could have done better. Of that, Arthur was sure. The cabin was spotless, the horses sleek and well-fed, and Dutch had eked out a little more life from the death he was having. But now Arthur saw the exhaustion in the bow of John’s mouth, the tension tied in the sinews along his shoulders. 

“Whatever you thought you owed him, your debt is paid,” Arthur said, deliberately meeting John’s eye. “Bonnie MacFarlane said the same thing actually. When I talked to her.”

John lit a cigarette, inhaled as long as he could before releasing the smoke into the air.

“You were there. I was just a kid. Shit, I was starving when he talked Hosea into keeping me. You remember don’t you?” John said. 

“Sure.” Arthur would never forget it.

“Hosea probably figured they already had you on their hands, and you were such a damn handful, but Dutch talked him into letting me stay. I was too stupid and feral to let Hosea teach me to read and write. But Dutch was mean enough to make it stick.”

“If you’d learned from Hosea, you’d be a sight better at it.”

John ignored the interjection. “I’d have been dead before I was thirteen if it weren’t for Dutch. And he saved my life a dozen or more times between then and eighteen.”

“I like to think I can take some credit,” Arthur groused.

“There’d have been no you without Dutch. Nothing gets forgotten.”

Arthur resented how that old, well-worn phrase conjured up happy memories, so he countered, “Or forgiven.”

He hoped that reminder could cast its own spell, reminding John of all there was to be angry about.

“Jack and Abigail and Javier and you and me and Tilly and Mary-Beth… we’re all here because Dutch loved us once.”

“Should I list them that died too?” 

“I’ve been with him for almost a year. He knows his ghosts. They haunt him every day.”

“He told you that.”

John shook his head. “No. It would take a bigger fool than me not to see it.”

They could have saved their breath of all this talking, for Arthur had completed his work and had come back to see to John completing his. He didn’t intend on being separated from him again, not as long as the choice was his.

“Okay. What do we need?” Arthur had always been a man of action.

  
  


* * *

  
  


The sick are nothing like the dying. The dying ooze: blood from a deep cough, pee from a spasm of pain, sweat from every gaping pore. It is undignified, messy, and agonizing. 

Though it was John who had borne the weight of this for many months, it was Arthur whom Dutch wanted most. He hoarsely asked for him at all hours. Most of the time, he talked as if they lived in days gone by, but in some haunting moments, he remembered his present and his bloodshot eyes saw what he had become.

Arthur found himself praying Dutch would never know, that he would die somewhere twenty years ago where his untimely demise was the only tragedy endured. 

“Arthur,” Dutch called one evening when Arthur came in from cutting the wood for his coffin, “Look in my things. I want to hear Victor Hugo tonight.” 

_ Les Miserables _ had been a favorite evening read-aloud. Hosea had preferred to sail in search of the white whale with Ahab, but Dutch had marveled over Victor Hugo’s prose and ideas. Jean Valjean had been an everyman hero, both sinner and saint, to emulate. On the inside cover, Dutch had scribbled words from an old print interview:

_ Wherever men go in ignorance or despair, wherever women sell themselves for bread, wherever children lack a book to learn from or a warm hearth, _ _ Les Misérables _ _ knocks at the door and says: "open up, I am here for you." ~ Hugo _

Below that, he had simply added, _ Save them as need saving, feed them as need feeding. _

Arthur thumbed past it to the old, beloved tale of the Bishop Myriel. He surprised himself by falling into the words as he had when he was younger, finding the voices of the characters. John finished up the dinner dishes and made his way over; Arthur secretly enjoyed the rapt expression as he listened.

“Your reading is getting good, son,” Dutch rasped, too tired and weak to lift his head. “Your French is atrocious.”

Arthur squinted at the small typeface of the pages, rubbed his hand over his tired eyes. He heard a click and looked over to see John rattling a pair of reading glasses at him. 

_ They were Dutch’s, _John mouthed.

“Sure,” Arthur said. He grunted in irritation until balancing them on his nose produced sharp, clear writing. He read, Dutch occasionally mouthing along with the lines. 

It became their nightly routine, peace in the turmoil of this storm.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Arthur is still my favorite person who cannot express how he feels.


	13. Home

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> No self-control. Another chapter. A big one.

Dutch lost consciousness halfway through Volume III, Marius’ tale. 

In the hours of goodbye, they became the van der Linde boys again. It wasn’t about Dutch. It was about the farewells they had never been able to offer anyone else.

If he could have, John would have read Lenny his father’s letter, that same one he carried from camp to camp with them. He read Hosea’s letters to Dutch now. 

Arthur had watched Susan bleed out onto the dusty ground, no one to help her, and he carefully wiped the blood from Dutch’s mouth.

In another life, Arthur would have held Hosea’s hands as he drifted away. He held Dutch’s now even as the final struggling gasps gave way to nothing.

And when the time came, though Arthur would never know it, John dug for Dutch the grave he had once wished he had prepared for Arthur: when he believed him dead, when he had mourned him. 

They laid Dutch to rest under a Saguaro cactus, said a few words from Evelyn Miller, Victor Hugo, and finally from Hosea Matthews himself.

“Take care of everyone, and stay together,” Arthur read from the letter. A better man, a man who could forgive Dutch his transgressions, would have dropped the paper into that open grave. Arthur tucked it in his pocket, a piece of Hosea he would be glad to keep.

“What now?” John asked as they stood at the grave, its barren finality releasing them from Pleasance House.

“Saddle up. We have a long ride ahead of us.”

They didn’t talk about Dutch anymore after that. Not that day as they rode under the blazing hot sun. Not around the campfire they built together. Not as they crossed the bridge over the Owanjilla dam. 

It was a door they no longer felt the need to reopen. It was the closest thing Arthur Morgan had ever had to closure.

  
  


* * *

  
  


She was beautiful under the dusky twilight. Absence did make the heart grow fonder. 

Arthur admired the house, jutting out from its land, proud as a peacock. A wrap-around porch defined it, big windows measured evenly around. The welcoming facade had no look of a fortress, no concessions made toward its defense. He knew every inch of it without walking inside: the wide hallway at the front opening up into a big living room. Hell, someday it might even have furniture besides the pot-bellied wood stove they had laboriously installed.

All the pleasure he took in the sight of it could not distract from the hot, whirling butterflies in his stomach. His heart hammered against his ribcage; his hands got slick like he was getting ready to pull a trigger on a target he wasn’t too sure about.

“What’s this?” John asked, casual as could be, oblivious as hell. 

“It’s mine. I bought the land, and I built it.” Arthur stared straight at the house. He felt John startle, but he knew if he looked over, his words would change. He would disguise truth from even himself if given the option. “I don’t know if I have ever done anything because I wanted to. I’ve made a lot of excuses, and I had choices, sure, everyone does. I never asked what I wanted out of my life ‘cause dying bloody seemed like the only answer. Now I think I’d like to live here, work the land a little, and draw in my journal.”

“Yeah?” 

“Sure. This is going to be my home. It can be yours too.” He drew in a long breath.

In his gut, he supposed he had never played out this moment because he always expected it to go one of two ways. John might be confused, tilt his head and kick back his hat, because they had already agreed to stick together. He might not see anything else here. Or John might shake his head and let him down easy, embarrassed for him, embarrassed for a man who misunderstood everything.

But when he looked to John, John, too, stared straight ahead at the house. A little muscle in the corner of his jaw pulsed beneath the scar tissue. 

“I want it to be ours,” Arthur amended. He liked those words. That was better, sounded stronger, more clear. John didn’t move.

Arthur waited as long as he could before he spoke again, a little too gruffly, “You gonna say something?”

“I might say the wrong thing,” John said.

It was going to be the second option then. His guts writhed.

“You don’t have to say nothing,” Arthur offered. Their voices matched, quiet and careful.

“I just don’t want to lose another twenty years not saying anything,” John said. Arthur realized he was talking to himself as much as anyone else. “But it’s better than losing all the rest of ‘em for saying the wrong thing.”

“Twenty years…” Arthur’s mumble was lost in the sudden turn of John’s body. 

“I don’t want to live here because you think you’re responsible for me. I’m not as stupid as I look, and I know they made you take care of me when it shouldn’t have been any of your business, and you did the best you thought you could by me, getting me a wife, getting me off that mountain. Even when I thought I’d just about caught up, it was you dragging my ass off a train in Mexico and getting me out of another scrape.”

John was more of a fool than he knew; Arthur’s fingers itched to take him by the shoulders, shut him up, tell him he'd always wanted to take care of him, but he recognized the cadence of a man who must release something long-held.

“All I ever wanted was to be where you are, and damn it, I don’t want it unless you mean it like I mean it.” 

They stared at each other, breathing a little heavy, all the air of the great outdoors suddenly too thin.

“That’s how I mean it,” Arthur managed.

John exhaled. His whole body relaxed at once, shoulders softening, mouth hanging slack for a moment of pure relief.

“Thank God,” he murmured. He clapped Arthur on the shoulder and left his hand there. 

  
  
  


* * *

  
  


“You ever think you wanted to get married?” John asked.

Arthur mused on it now as they ate on the bare pine floor. A cynic might call it revisionist history, but he thought the answer was no. It was true enough that he had hardly panted and pined over men over the years, had been with his share of women. He had loved Mary Gillis; with her loud, brash daddy, she had been his very own damsel to rescue. Only it turned out she saw the same thing in him, and neither of them had wanted to be saved.

He had never loved Eliza, a raven-haired, gentle girl with twin dimples, and he had never offered marriage. He had learned by then what was and wasn’t his way. 

“Not really.” Arthur shrugged. “I never saw it bring any man much joy.”

“Not even Hosea?”

“He loved Bessie, but it weren’t Bessie who his sun rose and set on.”

“I guess not.” 

Stomach grumbling, Arthur dug into his satchel for more food. He sliced a wedge off some cheese and held it out to John. He accepted. The energy in the air earlier, an expectant, humming anticipation, had faded to normal. After the uncomfortable terse death vigil, it should have been a relief, but Arthur instead worried they had missed a moment, a critical instance they would not be able to get back.

“Y’know,” Arthur said. “I did think about marrying Abigail myself along the way.”

“I know.” John’s eyes twinkled a little. “She would yell that at me if she got real angry. ‘I should have married Arthur Morgan.’ I always said you wouldn’t have had her, but I knew better.”

“How?” Arthur had never asked Abigail, certainly never told anybody his consideration of the idea. 

John ducked his head sheepishly and mumbled some answer. Arthur poked out his toe to nudge him with his boot.

“I don’t know how you expected me to understand a word of that.”

John coughed. “I said, it figures if you thought she’d make a fine wife and you thought a fine wife was a good thing, you’d want me to marry her.”

Normally, Arthur would have skirted around it. Today, he tried confronting it head-on. “Sure. I thought that was what you’d want once you grew up enough to stop being a dumbass. A good wife, a son. That’s what it’s all about for most folks.”

“I never much wanted a wife,” John said. “Until I had one. You were right. Abigail’s a good woman.”

“One of the best I know,” Arthur agreed.

“You know what I always wanted? So I was a dumb kid -- you know that, so I don’t know why I’m telling you -- but I stumble upon the gang when I’m hungry and tired, can’t read, can’t write, can’t do much of anything except pull a trigger. I’ve been watching men on the street, trying to be one, and they’re mean.” John paused. “Hell, they’re grabbing prostitutes for pennies and stabbing people for taking a sip out of the wrong whiskey. They’re beating their wives on the front porch while the whole town walks by. There I am thinking to be a man, you gotta be mean, low-down, no-good mean.”

“Then I meet you fellas. Hosea and Dutch were clean and calm and happy. They’d do things just to blot out all that ugliness I’d thought I was going to have to be. The only two men I’d ever seen who seemed really happy were those two. Women everywhere, of course, but it was still just them.”

Arthur nodded, and John finished, “I think I just decided somewhere along the way they’d found the way to be happy. ”

The simple idea, one Arthur himself had cherished so dear for so long, made him smile. 

As they cleaned up from dinner, Arthur cussing himself for not having a broom and John laughing over two old cowboys needing one, the silent question filled the air again. It asked them if they really intended to lay out their bedrolls on these fresh new floors and christen them with the same tired denial of every other night.

But hell, Arthur had already asked the question, John had already nearly said too much in answering it, and life was short. They’d watched more people die than they’d ever had the pleasure of seeing live to the age they were now.

John stood at the window, looking out into the dusky twilight at Buell and Grim. Before he could change his mind, Arthur touched his elbow, caught his attention. 

He opened his mouth to form words, only to realize he had used enough of them already. John waited for him. Funny how he had never noticed that before in his concern that he was a follower without a mind of his own: John waited for him.

They stared at each other until the world tilted and melted them together. They were kissing, but oh, it was so much more than that. Arthur had yearned for John so completely, so fully, he never dared feel it. Only now, in his arms, did he ache with the agony of wanting John, losing him, needing him, missing him. He mourned against his mouth, dug his fingers into his hair.

He asked God for it to be real, for he feared waking up from this dream might kill him.

  
  


* * *

  
  


Like a dreamy heroine in one of Mary-Beth’s novels, Arthur decided he would never tire of this. 

John was pliable under his touch. A finger run up the side of his neck made him shudder. The tilt of his head down made John’s bend back in delicious obedience. Would it have always been this way? In all those moments over all those years where he had shuffled away in gruff embarrassment, pulling at the suddenly tight denim, could he have kissed him and had this? 

“I’ve been wasting a lot of time not doing that,” he said against John’s mouth. 

“Twenty years. I’ve been counting,” John echoed, pulling him back in.

They’d laid out their scratchy blankets on the floor, but they hadn’t made it to them. They kissed against the wall, harder and faster, until their motions became the urgent rutting of animals, not men. Arthur kissed every John he had ever wanted in the singular man before him.

The outlaw, half-naked, washing blood off in the creek.

The arrogant prodigal son, swearing he’d have been back sooner if he could have goddamned found them.

The invalid, fevered fool, face decorated with his wife’s messy stitches.

The revolutionary, drunk and bumbling at a camp in Mexico. 

The broken-hearted, drunk and snoring in a hotel bed.

The bachelor, ocean-soaked, sand-caked, and reckless.

The faithful son who never left his undeserving father’s bedside.

Arthur finally took them all to bed tonight.

Wasted time did nothing to hurry their hands. Instead, it slowed to a crawl. They cupped one another’s faces in their hands to kiss themselves dizzy, shimmied away pants and gently unbuttoned shirts. 

“Have you ever been with a man?” John licked the question onto Arthur’s hip. 

“Sure. French painter kissed me in Saint Denis,” Arthur teased through a groan.

“And you let him.” The accusation bore no malice.

“Hell, I liked it.”

They rolled together, laughing, the blankets doing nothing to protect knees and elbows from the hard floor. John bent down to kiss Arthur’s throat. 

“You’ll like this too.” 

It was nothing like having a working girl in your bed, trying too hard to end the whole thing so she can go turn the next trick, her impatience bright as electric lights. All that mattered was the insistent bobbing of John’s head as his mouth worked its way up and down Arthur’s cock, his hands splayed wide on Arthur’s hipbones, his grunts and groans in time with every motion. 

Arthur grabbed the blanket in both hands beneath him, dropped his head back, and moaned. His insides throbbed, threatened to spill, and he ground his teeth together to hold back, to do anything except explode in John’s hot, hungry mouth. 

“Easy, brother,” Arthur growled. 

On the verge of being unable to stop, he gripped John by the hips and flung him over. He stayed there a moment, on his knees over his surprised lover, the O of that dirty mouth nearly undoing him. 

Arthur moved to John, held him erect in both hands for a reverent instant, the smell of sweat and sex like nothing he could have dreamed up, and then sank down onto the waiting cock. With his mouth wrapped around John, Arthur could feel every quiver, every moan, every wriggle. 

With a long, ragged cry, John came in a salty rush, leaving Arthur overcome, with no choice but to take his own cock in hand and finish against John’s leg before dropping onto him.

“Oof,” John grunted breathlessly.

“You were right,” Arthur managed through his shaky lungs. “I did like it.”

  
  


* * *

  
  


In the morning, Arthur got up early to ride the property line and have a talk with God, thank him for an undeserved second chance. When he came back, John was on the porch with a cup of coffee, tousled, sleepy, and he smiled when he saw Arthur. 

It was the paradise he had sought all along. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> They finally caught fire, y'all. 
> 
> The next chapter begins Part III of this three-part story.


	14. Cowhorses

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you like keeping track of ages, in 1917, Arthur would be 54 and John would be 44.

**Part III: 1917, Lake Owanjila Homestead**

It was home.

Not just a place to stay for a while or a place packed to the gills with memories, but a home with a big, warm fireplace and cozy kitchen and a few sketches throw up on the wall along the way.

They shared a big old bed under a feather-down quilt they’d stitched themselves. They squabbled and scratched out a living, but they never went to bed angry. There was too much to be happy about.

And when they were in Strawberry one day and a man’s horse bucked him into tomorrow and Arthur talked the beast down and returned him, they ended up with a new job.

They were horsemen. Probably should have thought of that themselves.

People from all over the Grizzlies started talking about those Callahan brothers, Arthur and John, and their way with horses. It didn’t make them rich, but it made them enough to get by, and they liked it. 

John Marston and Arthur Morgan were so long dead as to have disappeared from common memory. No one connected any dots. Why would they have?

They were just a couple of old cowboys who probably weren’t related and could talk the demons out of any horse.

People liked them. What was not to like?

And they were happy.

  
  


* * *

  
  


“Now you listen here, boy,” Arthur murmured. The colt whirled in the round pen, hooves pounding the dirt into dust. He kicked up his hind legs and trumpeted his displeasure. “You got no excuse for this. I’ve known wild stallions who’d give in quicker.”

He stood at the center of the pen, arms wide, driving the angry animal around him. The saddle flaps broke loose of their tie-down as the dervish continued his angry bucking.

“Devil in the form of a horse,” John called out from the chicken coop. He tossed a handful of grain out for the greedy hens. 

The colt in question, a massive Thoroughbred still young enough for gawkiness in his big frame, belonged to a bigshot businessman who was trying to get into horse racing. He had bought the animal for pennies on the dollar -- at least, on paper, if one looked at the bloodlines -- because the racing operation that had bred him couldn’t find an answer to his spirit. His registered name was Kilkenny Cross; Arthur hadn’t brought himself to use that fool moniker yet.

“You’re just impatient,” Arthur shot back, though he added under his breath, “Or I’m a fool.”

The horse had a sour temper on the flat -- he had taken a chunk out of John’s elbow within the first few hours of being here -- but once under saddle, he became a creature possessed. Arthur’s bag of tricks had started to run low. Leaving the saddle in the stall with the colt, keeping it on the fence of the paddock… all the tried and true strategies had done was cost Arthur one of his favorite saddles when the colt decided to tear it to shreds.

“C’mon, boy.” Arthur dropped his arms. It was simple body language; the wide arms drove the horse away while the opposite invited him in. The colt paid it no mind. “C’mhere, and I’ll get it off of you.”

John chuckled and continued with his morning chores, leaving Arthur to deal with the devilish horse himself. They had a lot of final touches to wrap up today to get ready for their biggest work: the spring training of cow horses. The MacFarlane and Pronghorn Ranch horses would be arriving. It had started with Bonnie, listening to Arthur on her first visit here, complaining about their horses.

“They’re good animals, sure, but they’ve got no cow instincts. And we can’t afford better quality horses without cutting our profits too low.”

“Cow instincts can be taught,” Arthur had said, and Bonnie had laughed and bet him he couldn’t teach her lot of nags how to cut and herd. 

He and John had done it faster than even he’d thought. After all, he’d been thinking of it as a big job, but it wasn’t like breaking horses, starting from scratch. It was just showing good horses who liked to work and liked their riders how to do it better. Now they did it annually with sets of horses from ranches around the area.

When Arthur had finally wrestled the colt out of his saddle and turned him out, he made his way into the kitchen. John had gussied the place up a little this morning, lined their boots by the door rather than leaving them in the middle of the floor, hung spare hats on the rack rather than letting them be thrown on the table. Banjo, a shepherd mix they picked up from a kid selling puppies in front of the general store, had resigned himself to sleep in the corner to avoid being affected by this fit of cleaning.

“You don’t think she’s going to bring the horses herself?” Arthur asked. He sat down at the table and picked up the neatly folded paper to peruse the headlines.

John nodded. “She will.”

“With a baby at home?” Arthur shook his head. “Naw, she’ll just send Amos.”

“She’ll come,” John disagreed, and Arthur recognized a moment to keep his mouth shut. Besides, he was arguing against himself; he wanted her to come along too. Unlike John Marston, he had always had a real fondness for babies and was hoping to meet the newest MacFarlane Ranch resident.

John rinsed out his coffee mug with water from the basin. In moments like this, pride swelled inside Arthur. Even after a few years, he was still the man who never could have believed this possible: John in sock feet at a sink, so at home his cattlemen revolver was in a drawer, hadn’t been pulled out in a few days. They had created peace.

“C’mhere.” Arthur set down the paper he had just intended to read.

“I just heard you use that line on a horse.”

“Sure.” 

John sat down in the chair across from him, scooted it in until their knees touched. “What?”

“Nothing.” And Arthur leaned in to kiss him, coffee breath and all, until John’s mouth lost the amused smile and became an open, soft, hungry answer to an unspoken question. Arthur sat back, a smug grin, on his face and opened the paper back up. “War in Europe’s getting worse.”

“Dumbass,” John grumbled, eyes bright with amusement. “You might want to trim up after you finish the mucking. You’re scratchy.”

“The mucking?” Arthur cussed under his breath. He had forgotten; last night, they’d played horseshoes for it and John had won handily. That meant the clean, fresh chore of heading into town for groceries. “Shit.”

John was already stuffing his feet into his boots.

“Catch you later then,” John said with a wink as he disappeared out the door. Banjo barked at the door as it fell closed. It opened again a smidge, and Arthur heard John say, “Sorry, boy. C’mon.”

The door closed behind the eager, wagging tail.

Arthur kicked back to finish reading the paper. The world it described seemed impossible to imagine, a place across the vast ocean where ordinary men blew each other up over government treaties. The only reason he had ever shot a man was for personal gain. While he was not proud of killing, he was glad he had only ever done it of his own volition, not because a nameless, faceless country told him some father or brother deserved to die.

The paper hinted that the U.S. would be entering the war now, dragging Americans into this European mess. 

Arthur lit a cigarette and smoked his way through the cheerier parts of the paper. Jimmy Saint’s regular humor column earned a chuckle with a few cracks about Hollywood cowboys.

  
  


* * *

  
  


John had been exactly right. Bonnie MacFarlane Walters came trotting up the lane with a string of cowponies behind her and a giggling baby tucked against the saddlehorn. Amos rode at the rear, his familiar beleaguered expression no match for his stubborn boss. She passed the baby down to John before she dismounted.

“Sarah Grace Walters, meet the two men who’ll train your first pony,” Bonnie said by way of a greeting. Arthur admired the child, plump and rosy, bright-eyed and particularly alert for a child not yet two. She twisted her face into skeptical appraisal of the rough, scarred cowpoke holding her, and Arthur clapped his hands to hold them out for her instead.

“Miss Sarah Grace, this man doesn’t know a thing about babies,” Arthur said. Sarah held out her arms for him, and he tucked her close. “You come with me, and I’ll show you around while your mama and John take care of the horses.”

Arthur didn’t even mind the teasing he heard from them as he scooped Sarah off to the house. She showed off her expansive vocabulary (“No!”, “Da-da,” and “Mine!”) as he indulgently pulled out anything she might like to play with. Scooting around the floor with Banjo’s bone seemed to bring her the greatest joy.

The old memory came back to him of Jack Marston as a little one, no bigger than this, deciding his best toy was Pearson’s soup ladle. His exasperated mother had collapsed in rare tears over the sobbing whenever it was taken away. Not even Uncle Arthur and his magic touch had been able to soothe him. It hadn’t been long after that when his father had ridden out to hunt one day and not come back for over a year.

Remembering that no longer stung, but it did make him think of Abigail and Jack Marston, whatever their last names were now, and hope the best for them. Jack had once been the little prince of a dying kingdom. Not a soul in that family would have wanted anything more than for him to be successful.

Sarah unleashed a bout of loud flatulence and then laughed at her success. It brought with it the unpleasant whiff of a dirty diaper.

“Jesus.” Arthur wrinkled his nose. “Let’s go find your mama and get you cleaned up.”

Bonnie stayed into the evening before beginning their usual choreographed argument. She claimed not to want to be in their hair, talked up the ease of riding into Strawberry to stay at the Welcome Center. They both countered in faux irritation about her wasting money and not appreciating their hospitality. And as always, they all fell upon Amos, who would most certainly already be dead asleep in the loft, as the excuse to stay.

“Well, let me put this little girl to bed, and then I’ll go give my mare one last once over. Her back right’s been needing a poultice now and again,” Bonnie said, smiling. On the floor with Banjo, Sarah had the droopy, half-gone expression of a baby who might collapse any moment.

“If she won’t cry her eyes out, I can put her down,” John offered.

“That would be just fine,” Bonnie said, and this time, it was she and Arthur sharing the teasing looks as John scooped Sarah up and headed for the bedroom. “Is he about to give us your bed?”

“He always does.” Arthur shrugged. They had a guest bed in the spare room, a straw tick mattress that was a little small but just serviceable for one person. John always gave their fine comfy bed away when Bonnie came to visit, even though he wasn’t the one whose joints creaked and ached every morning. 

“Sorry. Guess you’ll both be sharing his room then.”

“Sure.” Arthur softened. “It’s okay. I’d give it up myself too. I just like giving him a hard time. Go check on the horses, and I’ll wash up these dishes right quick.”

Everyone’s life is made up of little lies. The woman who promises her husband she has never so much as looked at another man. The father who tells his son it won’t tear up his guts to kill his first animal. Even the softest lives contain untruths. 

For two men who lived as partners, those untruths might be even more widespread. On occasion, Arthur had played it out in his head, what it might be like to upend the assumptions they had let her build. He could look at her one of these visits and just say, “You sleep in our bed. We’ll sleep in the guest room.” He liked to imagine she wouldn’t think too much of it. Surely she had seen her share of ranch hands who turned to each other on cold, lonely nights.

But then, maybe that was the reason he never said anything. She might not think too much of it. She might just see it as men in an all-male world just stuck humping each other, and he wasn’t sure he wanted anyone to ever think that of him and John. 

If he could have anyone, he would pick John, every day, every time, every way. Theirs was not created of convenience.

He scrubbed the last dish clean and slipped back to the bedroom. Faint, raspy singing slowed his steps. Pausing in the doorway, he drank it in without disturbing it. John knelt at the bedside, one big hand carefully tucking the blanket over Sarah, the other smoothing a swirl of blonde hair away from her face. 

_ “Oh Shenandoah, I long to hear you. Away you, rolling river. Across that wide and rolling river,” _ John mumbled as much as he sang, but Sarah’s eyelids bobbed heavy. In the pause, Arthur jumped in softly to help with the next words.

_ “Away, I’m bound away,” _ Arthur sang, the scratch of his singing voice unfamiliar in his throat.

_ “Across the wide Missouri,” _ they finished together in soft disharmony.  _ “Oh Shenandoah, I love your daughter. For her, I’d cross your roaming waters. Away, I’m bound away across the wide Missouri.” _

Sarah snuffled, that tell-tale exhale of a person slipping into sleep. Arthur expected a smile on John’s face, for he himself had never played with a little one without one. The furrowed brow surprised him.

“Was Jack like this?” John kept his voice low. “I--I don’t remember.”

“Sure.” Arthur put his hand on John’s back, let his thumb skate a lazy path over a shoulder blade. “He was a loud little fella. The squalling about drove us all to drink, remember?”

The joke landed with a thud between them, so Arthur went on, “Susan would look him right in the eye in that way of hers and say, ‘My turn,’ and he would just stop. No one else could do that, but she’d never take him until everyone else had been worn to nothing.”

“I went out robbing a lot.”

“Your family needed the money.”

“I hope he turned out okay.” 

They had these times over the years. The past would suddenly seem too big and too heavy, too much for them to turn away from. The echoes of old words and fears would drown out the new peace. Sometimes Arthur feared they were the truth: this thing they thought they had found was no more real than who they once thought they had been. His fears always passed though, if he gave them enough time. He thought John’s did too.

“Me too.”

They made their way out to the living room. Bonnie talked more than they did, sharing with them the joys of her married life. Her time bumping elbows with outlaws had been shielded from her husband, for she never wanted to share the parts of that story that still woke her up in a cold sweat some nights. Ranching troubles were enough for their marriage bed to share.

She seemed happy, though. Arthur was glad for that.

He was also glad when they finally all went to bed, and the door to the little guest room shut with an extra hard tug because it always stuck. They threw a bedroll they wouldn’t use on the floor. It was the best part of her visit every year, the part that felt like all the times they had wanted to rut each other and hadn’t. 

Now it was nothing but a game.

They both laid there, barely touching, cocks hardening between them, breathing hitching, all but pretend snoring. 

It was Arthur who broke first, but John’s relieved groan suggested he couldn’t have held out much longer himself.

* * *

  
  


Once the Pronghorn horses were dropped off too, Arthur and John had fifteen cow horses to teach to cut and one stubborn, borderline dangerous racehorse to convince to bear a saddle. They worked long days until Arthur’s back screamed and John had to dig the knots out with his body weight thrown into both hands.

“Getting old may be a privilege denied to many, but I wish you’d wait a few more years to take advantage of it,” John complained, but he kissed the nape of Arthur’s neck, tossed him a book, and made dinner that night.

One of the geldings, an overweight Paint, had an acute fear of cattle. Every time Arthur would cluck him up into the herd, he would tremble beneath him and look for any excuse to turn tail. John worked multiple horses to completion in the three weeks Arthur worked with Stubby. 

Patience may have been wearing a little thin on the overcast day when John took one of the better cowhorses out herding. Arthur gave Stubby the pep talk of a lifetime as he saddled and brushed him, trying out all manner of tales from Daniel in the lion’s den to Bill Williamson facing his fear of clowns. Of course, it wasn’t the pep talks that worked, surely, but Stubby finally faced down a lone cow for the first time that day.

“That’s my boy,” Arthur murmured, patting his withers. He let the gelding back away gracefully and nearly laughed at the confident high step. “Easy there. You didn’t stop a whole stampede there, champ.” 

He almost didn’t notice the rumble at first, but then Stubby’s ears swiveled back toward the house. Arthur touched his spurs to the horse’s sides. Banjo loosed his throaty warning bark.

It was a dirty black car barely making its way down a driveway not made big enough for one. Arthur squinted against the sun. The driver parked and unfolded himself from his seat. Even from here, he had the whiff of big city, a man whose boots had never been on dirt roads. 

Arthur’s lip curled; these were his least favorite kinds of clients.

“Can I help you?” He called out.

The man turned to the sound of his voice, and Arthur appraised him more carefully. His clothing was none so fine as Arthur had first thought: a clean, well-kept suit but no fancy cloth or trimmings. He was younger too, lean and unlined, with dark hair cropped short. The young man paused to pat Banjo, the terrible guard dog whose tail had already started wagging.

“Maybe, sir. I’m looking for John Callahan.”

“This about a horse?”

“No. I don’t own a horse.”

Warning bells chimed in Arthur’s head as he dismounted. He passed Stubby’s reins into his left hand and extended his right. “It’s unusual for someone to be here without a horse as the reason. I’m Arthur Callahan, John’s brother.”

Suddenly the other man looked uncomfortable. “It’s nice to meet you. Is your brother home?”

“I don’t know how they do things where you’re from, but here it’s customary to offer your name when being introduced to someone new.”

“Right. Uh, um, yes, well actually, my name’s John too. Common enough name but I didn’t want to create any confusion.”

“Sure.” Arthur narrowed his eyes, weighed the common sense option of telling this kid to get lost against the strange feeling in his gut telling him not to. “Wouldn’t want that.”

“I just have some business with him, that’s all. Legal business.” The kid’s eyes widened in sudden fear. “Not that he’s in trouble. Not that kind of legal business.”

“Huh,” was all Arthur offered in response to that. “Well, you’re welcome to stick around. I’ve got some work to do, but John’ll be back.”

“When?”

“Oh, I dunno. Could be an hour. Could be dark.”

“Oh.”

As he untacked Stubby in the barn, Arthur watched the kid out of the corner of his eye. He couldn’t have been much out of his teenage years, the shine of youth still on his face. Arthur grabbed his pistol from the holster hanging on the wall, just in case this kid thought he was here to deliver some sort of lawsuit against horse wranglers or worse, a summons on old business. He wouldn’t put lead in a messenger for bad news, but he had never been against warning shots.

“It was your turn anyway,” Arthur said to Kilkenny Cross. By now, he had given in to the inevitable and nicknamed him Devil. He slipped the rope halter onto the colt and lead him to the round pen. As he latched the gate shut again, Devil snapped at him, but this wasn’t Arthur’s first rodeo. He put his elbow out at the same time. Apparently even this horse wasn’t interested in having his teeth rattled twice, so he waited for instructions.

“Is that a Thoroughbred?” The young man had made his way to the fence to watch.

Arthur nodded, turning the colt loose to buck and canter his way around the pen. “Racehorse.”

“He’s…” Perhaps the word beautiful had been about to come out of his mouth. Arthur would never know because Devil bucked so hard he farted with each twist and toss. 

“A handful,” Arthur finished. 

The kid watched Arthur work with the colt. A few times, he asked questions. His knowledge ran a little deeper than his clothes might have suggested; he asked if the colt had been saddlebroke here or at a track, mused over the possibility of his teeth needing floated. The kid wasn’t all city and automobiles.

John Marston returned within the hour. He tipped his hat to Arthur, the same flippant wave he always did, one often accompanied with jokes about being the only one to really work around here.

Then he froze. His eyes were on the kid.

“Hello, sir,” the kid said.

“Jack.” John sank off his horse, his legs barely catching him. 

Arthur stared between them at the truth suddenly clear as day. Under the city slicker exterior, the kid had John’s jawline, Abigail’s eyes, the lean build of his father, the gentility of his mother. The wave of emotion hit him with enough force to embarrass him; he coughed to disguise it.

Little Jack Marston had grown up, and somehow, he had found them.


	15. Bad News

“She died at home. My… um, Wallace paid for the doctors and nurses to come to her.”

Jack sat there on the couch in their living room and told them his mother was dead. Arthur dared not look at John, for he feared if he saw the pain on the other man’s face, it might make his own real. Instead, he stared straight ahead at this boy-stranger-who-wasn’t and wished for it to be yesterday. Yesterday they had watched the sunset on the porch and everything had been good.

For them, yesterday, Abigail Roberts Marston had been alive somewhere, wearing pretty dresses and keeping her city apartment shiny clean. 

“She must have lived with tuberculosis for a long time before she showed any symptoms. The doctor said some… populations have a higher rate of TB than others.”

Jack kept supplying more information to fill the awful silence. 

“I was there. Wallace had to go to work sometimes, we’d trade off so I didn’t get behind on my classes and he paid the bills, and she seemed better that day.” He stopped, battled away the catch in his voice, and plowed on. “It was quiet.”

He had nothing else to say. The silence weighed a thousand pounds.

“Good,” John finally said.

Arthur wanted to ask it for him: had she said anything about John at the end? The world had denied them goodbyes. Had it denied them even something so small as final words?

Instead, he sat there. He lit a cigarette and held another one out to John without looking at him. It disappeared from his fingers.

“Wait. Arthur...” Jack said, turning the word into contemplation. His face changed. His voice grew cautious. “Uncle Arthur?”

If his heart had been broken in two by the news of Abigail’s passing, that simple question, turning a grown man’s voice into a child’s once more, jolted life back into its pieces.

“It’s been a long time, Jack. You probably don’t remember me.”

“Not a lot.” Jack’s eyes widened. He glanced over at John. “But enough.”

Arthur swallowed around the lump in his throat. So afraid of being denied, his request was a command. “You’ll stay for a few days. We’ll do something for your mama.”

“I… Okay. I’d like that.”

“In the meantime, I’d better go get us something to eat.” Arthur stood up and left the room before anyone could ask him to stay.

Those two had a lot they needed to say to each other. Whether they chose to or not wasn’t up to him.

  
  


* * *

  
  


Standing at the chicken pen, Arthur grieved. He never knew how much he had counted on dying before Abigail Roberts until now. He had never imagined the world without her in it. Her quiet strength, her quick wit, her survival instincts: the world was poorer for the loss of her. The clouds, heavy with threatening rain, agreed. 

And Jack… To see him alive was an answered prayer, but what cruel, capricious god had sacrificed Abigail for this dreamed-of moment? 

The tiny infant whose head had once fit in Arthur’s palm was a man now, all at once, in an instant, as sudden for Arthur as the loss of Abigail. Jack’s early years had been lost in the slide into the abyss. Even so simple a thing as a fishing trip had become threatening. In the final days Arthur had known him, the little boy had become a shivering, nervous creature, terrified of his own shadow, passed from adult to adult in a dizzying dance.

The man in his house now was a testament to the iron will of a good woman. She had saved the boy they all nearly destroyed.

Arthur knew better than to think John deserved credit for anything Jack had become. John had never shaken the noose until he had already lost his wife and son. That was its own kind of grief, perhaps already put off too long.

He pulled out his journal before the rain could come down. His thoughts poured onto the page faster than his hand could write. If he looked back on this entry someday, he would probably find missing words, undotted i’s and uncrossed t’s, but without looking now, he began to draw her from memory. Behind his eyelids, she was in front of him once more, smiling and teasing, asking him her favors and checking on him more than anyone else.

The little cross and the swirly A.R. finished the page, but he felt no better.

He wrung a rooster’s neck and picked it clean for dinner. Inside, John and Jack had managed to find a stilted, polite conversation. He took care not to interrupt it as he made dinner.

Arthur noticed Jack didn’t call him Uncle Arthur again, and he never called John anything but “sir.”

  
  


* * *

  
  


“I thought we might need this.”

John brought a bottle of whiskey to bed. In the quiet dark of the bedroom, they drank themselves sloppy. At first, it hurt too badly to speak of her, even to remember the sweetness of the best times, but alcohol promises loosened inhibitions. When they finally fell away, both men shared stories they never would have dared sober.

John confessed Abigail as the seductress in their tale, remembered the first time she took him by the belt buckle and said, “I don’t know who you think you’re going to be, Marston, but I see through it.” Then she had dragged him to bed and made him hers. Arthur had always imagined it the other way, his John as the stampede through Abigail’s life. 

Arthur shared the memories of all the times he nearly married her. When Jack had been little and John had been gone, he had come upon her crying on a rock outside of camp. Of course, she had tried to put herself back together when she saw him, wiping her face, babbling baby talk to the cooing infant in her lap, but the image had shaken him. He had held her in his arms, Jack in the hollow between them, and he had nearly proposed right then. He had been so certain he could give her better.

These two men talked until the touching knees and searching hands lit the fire again. They made love from their grief.

It was quiet, muffled, hidden as if Jack were not just some guest in their home but the entirety of their past life, and in the morning, headache roaring between his ears and pinching the backs of his eyeballs, Arthur stared at the ceiling. 

Abigail deserved a better goodbye than the rough pleasure of men who had let her down so many times before.

John grunted out a long snore, strands of hair quivering in front of his mouth. Arthur smoothed them back, dropped a kiss on his forehead, and set to work.

  
  


* * *

  
  


Arthur made his morning cup of coffee. He noted the open guest room door, the bed made up neatly as if no one had ever been there, and the absence of Banjo weaving around his legs begging for breakfast. He glanced out the window; the car was still sitting in the driveway. So he didn’t bother looking.

He found the kid anyway. When he got out to the barn, Arthur saw Jack in the stalls. He had on suit pants again, but he had cuffed the sleeves of the dress shirt as if that could make him look at home mucking out stalls. 

“I don't usually put guests to work until after I’ve fed them,” Arthur said by way of a greeting.

Jack looked up but didn’t stop mucking. He jammed the pitchfork under a pile of manure and tossed it in the wheelbarrow. Arthur started cleaning the bridles. 

“I couldn’t sleep,” Jack said. “I didn’t think it’d be so hard to see him again.”

“No one wants to be the bearer of bad news.” 

“I thought he was dead until after she got sick.”

“What?” Arthur’s hands froze on the reins. 

“She told me he was alive and came to find us. One of those deathbed confessions I hoped was just part of the stories I read,” Jack said. “Followed it up by making me promise I’d finish law school.”

Arthur whistled low. On one hand, he had to admire Abigail’s ruthless practicality. In New York City, after seeing her again, John had needed a gallon of whiskey to process it. The woman whose husband had just returned from the dead must have squared her shoulders and shown no signs of it.

Still, the admiration fell in the shadow of deep disappointment. Keeping her new life had been her choice, John’s choice, and they had every right to make it, but that didn’t give them the right to leave this kid in the dark. Hell, when all of them had been teenagers, they had already faced down the worst the world had to offer; they’d all learned how to wash blood off their hands and out of their favorite shirts by then. Jack could have handled making some decisions of his own.

“I’m sorry,” Arthur said. He would save his criticisms to speak to the sky where Abigail alone might hear them. 

Jack leaned the pitchfork against the wall. “He was not a good father.”

Arthur closed his eyes and took a deep breath. Even if it was his place to dispute it -- and it surely wasn’t -- he didn’t think he could. 

“But I would have liked to know he was alive, and I would have liked to have seen him when he came looking for me.”

“Your folks thought they were making the best decision for you.”

“Ma always did. I told her I wanted to be a lawyer once when I was eleven, and she sacrificed everything she could get her hands on to make it happen. I think…” Jack hesitated. His eyes looked but saw nothing. “I worry she sent him away for me too.” 

Arthur wasn't going to touch that one. He slapped his hands against his knees and stood up. “Do you know how to ride?”

Jack startled from the thoughtful reverie. “Yes.”

“Take the gelding in the back right stall. The chestnut there. I could use the help.”

They saddled up and started out on the trail. Arthur waited until the beautiful sky and flower-dappled fields worked their magic; Jack’s shoulders relaxed, the tension in his face softened. Then Arthur spoke up.

“John Marston’s a complicated man. I won’t tell you stories to convince you of anything. I think you’ve every right to make up your own mind, but you should know how I found him again. He was in Mexico, trying to hunt down his brothers, to get you and Abigail back,” Arthur said. “He was more than ready to die and to kill to protect you.”

“I--”

But Arthur kept talking. “Abigail loved you more than you’ll ever understand. I doubt she told you much about her growing up, and I won’t betray her confidence, but it was bad. For John, too. They came from worse than nothing, and they never let you feel so much as a hunger pang. If your mama wanted you to be a lawyer, it was only because she believed you wanted it more. They’re good folks, your parents, and they deserved better than they got.”

“I miss her so much,” Jack said. Arthur did not look over, not wanting to see the expression accompanying that quivery voice. 

“You’ll miss her every day for the rest of your life. But you don’t have to miss him unless you want to. He’s here, and there ain’t no trouble.”

Jack had nothing to say, which was just as well. They loped the horses out, enough to keep their muscles loose and limber, and then trotted them back. Arthur admired the kid on a horse. He had come a long way from the little boy he used to pull up by one arm and tuck between him and the saddle horn. Jack's muscle memory suggested John had done alright by him when teaching him how to ride.

“I didn’t sign up for another semester of classes,” Jack admitted as they rounded the bend back toward the house. “I want to be a writer. Not a lawyer.”

“Sure.” Arthur nodded. “John’ll be glad to hear it.”

“What about you?”

“Ain’t seeing that you’ve got much reason to care what I think. But I’m pleased enough. Lawyers always seemed about like ticks to me, and I haven’t ever been one for parasites.”

“Did you know there’re other kinds of symbiosis besides parasitism?” Jack looked to him for confirmation. Arthur tilted his head to indicate he should keep talking. “One kind is phoresy. That’s where one thing uses another for transportation but not food. It mostly happens in bugs.”

“That’s real interesting,” Arthur said charitably. “Is that the kind of stuff you plan to write about?”

“No. That’s from a Natural History book I was reading under the table in my Contract Law class last semester.” Jack almost laughed, a short exhale. “I’d like to write fiction.”

“That’s always been my favorite.”

“Listen, Arthur, would you mind maybe not telling…” Jack fumbled over what to call him. “... my father what I said about him? I’m trying to mend fences.”

“I understand.”

As they untacked the horses and Jack walked toward the house, shoulders squared back and head held high, looking for all the world like a soldier going into battle rather than a boy to his father, Arthur ignored the tickling sensation of something unsaid. 

There was something Jack still wasn’t telling them. He just didn’t know what.


	16. Shared Spaces

Jack stayed. 

He drove into Strawberry after a few days and sent a telegram to his other father. Arthur imagined Wallace as a mustached, tailored man who took his meals at the club every evening and would likely be very disappointed to hear his son had struck out “find himself” in the West. As for the father here… Arthur could watch the soft glow in John’s eyes forever. 

Jack hid any emotion in his decision to stay by offering to help with the horses for a cut of the pay. 

“It’ll help me pay my way until I figure out how to do it with my pen,” he explained.

The first few nights dissolved the awkwardness through sheer proximity. Little moments became habits and routines, cement gluing together the cracks. It only took a few days for Banjo to take up permanent residence in the guest room at Jack’s feet. Arthur should have minded, but the dog snored almost as bad as he did so he just appreciated the reprieve. 

Jack turned out to be decent enough at horse work. John took advantage of the opportunities to show off, teaching the young man how to rope and cut. 

On a quiet evening, before the heavy summer storms rolled in, they buried a cross at a pile of stones in the meadow. Jack had graciously carved _ Always in our hearts _ on it. The plural took away some of the sting of it saying Abigail Roberts rather than Abigail Marston. 

Getting to know Jack was the sweetest gift of all. The pleasure he took in it was Arthur’s sign of just how old he himself was getting. The boy had a poet’s spirit, a dreamy way with words and reverence for solitude. He would take a seat at the kitchen table with his black-bound book and write for two hours without looking up, alone even if they chatted around him. He could be so quiet. 

But when the fiery Marston temper reared up, he could bite a person’s head off. Once he was certain they weren’t going to kill each other, Arthur half-enjoyed listening to two grown men argue with each other about politics or the right way to cut a block of cheese. They carefully avoided any of the topics where the fight might become real, where genuine anger and resentment might color their words.

  
  


* * *

“I’m getting the knack of it,” Jack said.

Arthur glanced over at the boy who was most certainly not getting the knack of it. He did not comment. 

John and Jack had gone out shooting a few times, and John always came back bristled. The man could teach horsework because it had been taught to him. He had been coached through it by Arthur, Dutch, Hosea, a slew of people who had experience and lent it to him. But shooting… shooting was an outlaw’s breathing. 

If Arthur and John ever tried to explain it to each other, they’d probably end up at each other’s throats. 

“He has no eye at all. I keep telling him what to do, but he’s shooting like a damn O’Driscoll,” John had groused.

The O’Driscoll gang had been a gaggle of hired hands, lost boys of all stripes looking to make a name for themselves. They had been a queer mix of real marksmen, the kind who could hit a squirrel through the eye without spoiling the meat, and backyard cowboys who had never had a real gun in their hands before Colm handed it to them. None of them had been gunslingers, men who could stay calm and hunt their fellow man at a dead gallop. They just hoped for the best every time they pulled a trigger.

Jack set up the old cans again. The biggest can had a hole in it from a successful strike; the others had merely blown off the log.

Arthur continued to roll cigarettes, his journal a makeshift desk on his lap. He had to do something since the boy had dragged him outside to witness him missing.

“You want help?” Arthur finally asked.

Jack gritted his teeth and shook his head. His hair was getting shaggy, hanging a little loose around his face, and he had on one of his father’s striped shirts. Like many other parts of the boy, it was a hint of the soft life Abigail had provided for him in his adolescence. He hadn’t been responsible for washing his own clothes very long.

“Did you get help when you were learning?”

“Nope.”

“Then me either.” Jack set back to work. “If Pa would stop barking at me every few seconds, I might have learned faster.”

“Maybe.”

Jack kept at it until he got some control of his tendency to pull left. He overcorrected his hands, shot a little higher on the next few rounds, and when he finally quit because the light was fading out, he seemed pleased. Arthur wasn’t too impressed by the shooting. He liked the spirit behind the eyes, though.

“It’s harder than it looks,” Jack said. He sat down on the bullet-riddled log and held out a hand hopefully. “May I?”

Arthur passed him a cigarette, he produced his own lighter, and they traded until both were puffing away cheerfully.

“Just think, the shooting’s the easy part. It’s the killing that’s tough.”

“Were you always an outlaw?” The question came out of nowhere, caught Arthur off-guard.

“I was talking about hunting just then,” Arthur said tightly. "Killing animals."

“Yeah, yeah.” Jack backtracked hastily. “I know. I was wondering though.”

It was a normal question. Anyone would have asked it in Jack’s shoes. Arthur tried to see it that way: generic curiosity from a kid who didn’t know any better. He couldn't see how hard the two men he saw now had worked to become this version of themselves. For Jack, it was a Wild West story, a good time, an adventure that felt like fiction. It would never have the sharp edges of reality, good or bad. 

“I don’t think I want to talk about it,” Arthur said.

“Oh.” Jack seemed surprised. 

“You going to take a few more shots before the light’s gone?”

Jack nodded, finished his cigarette, and set the cans back up.

“Why are you trying to learn to shoot anyway?”

That was a normal question too, expected under the circumstances, but Jack flinched. It happened so fast Arthur might have missed it if he hadn’t known it was coming. 

“I might have to know how. You do a lot of hunting to keep meat on the table. You might like help sometime if I stay for a while.”

“Sure.” Arthur stood up and brushed stray tobacco leaves off his lap. “If you’re thinking you’ll be any good at hunting, you’ll need to stop breathing so hard. Breathe normal and pull the trigger right after you breathed out.”

Jack took the advice and did better. 

As they walked back to the house under the dark reds and blues of sunset, Arthur sought out a conversation they could have without awkwardness.

“How’s your writing going?” 

“Terrible,” Jack admitted. He shrugged, a sheepish smile appearing at the corners of his mouth. “It’s not a book right now. It’s barely more than outlines of ideas I’m never going to write.”

“Why not?”

“Because if I was inspired enough to write them, I would just get started.”

“I guess. Never tried my hand at fiction myself.”

“All that work in your journals is just drawing?”

“And writing. I’ve always been a fool for getting my thoughts out on a page. I don’t think they’re real to me until I can read them. Thinking them’s not enough.”

“I can understand that,” Jack said.

The conversation veered from personal writings to the things they had read recently. Arthur had enjoyed the latest Henry Kitchell Webster novel, an interesting look at suffragettes that reminded him of more than one fiery woman he had known. Jack had read a book of poetry by a man named T.S. Eliot. Arthur might have sniffed at the idea, but as Jack shared some lines he remembered -- “In a minute, there is time for decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse” -- Arthur could see why it was worth checking out.

“I’ll give it a try,” Arthur said, and Jack grinned back in youthful, open surprise.

“A cowboy reading poetry,” he marveled.

“Just goes to show how little you know about cowboys,” Arthur said, thinking of all the philosophy and poetry tried around a nighttime campfire.

  
  


* * *

  
  


All was peaceful, easy even, until one morning they had been catching up on the news, the paper divided into three sections, and Jack unleashed a particularly salty bit of profanity.

“President Signs Conscription Bill,” Jack read, shaking the paper. “Mandatory draft registration.”

“What exactly does that mean?” John stood up to peer over his shoulder at the text.

“It means Uncle Sam is sending his nephews to war,” Jack said. “Whether they like it or not.”

“Poor bastards,” John said.

“Poor bastards? I’m 21. I have to sign up too.”

“You don’t exactly have to.” John snorted. “It’s a big country, and there’s plenty of able-bodied men willing to die for it. You don’t have to.” 

Jack squared up. “So you don’t think I could fight?”

“Of course you could fight. Any man can fight. It’s real easy. You just point and shoot. I don’t think a boy as smart as you can possibly think you have any business in Europe in some war we know nothing about.”

“I have friends back home who had been talking about it for months. The papers have been printing stories all about how our Allies were going to fall without American assistance.”

“And what exactly is it about our Allies falling that matters to you?”

“I don’t run from my responsibilities.” Jack’s voice ran cold, his emphasis on “I” unmistakable.

“So to prove you’re better than me, you’re willing to get yourself killed?”

“It’s better than running away or hiding your whole life.”

“Is this about my life or is it about yours? Make up your mind, boy.”

The angry growl in John’s voice set Banjo to barking, and Arthur eased to his feet too. 

“Hush now.” Banjo barked louder. Arthur snapped again. “I said, shut up.”

John and Jack both turned to look at him. In a different kind of moment, Arthur might have been amused at how suddenly alike they were, twin pillars of anger and irritation with matching scowls.

“I don’t know what the hell you two think you’re fighting about. We’ve got to make the trip out to Hennigan’s Stead, finish out this job, before we can think about anything else.” Arthur made eye contact with Jack deliberately. “You signed on for a cut of the pay. You took a job, and a man sees a job through.”

“It’s a two-man ride,” Jack replied, though his Adam’s apple bobbed in his throat. “You said so yourself.”

“Not this year,” Arthur said. “I’m taking the Devil along for the ride.”

Of course, he hadn’t been planning on taking that stupid horse on a long drive. He was a fine-boned, unpredictable, mean-as-a-snake track horse who had no business out on the range. Shit, just a few days ago, the colt had thrown him, and he had been doing everything he could to hide the limp and pastiche of bruises earned from it. But if he was taking a dumb and dangerous horse on the trek, John and Jack would both go too. It seemed worth any risk.

“You’re a fool, Morgan. That colt’s not worth dying over,” John said.

“He’s getting better. I think getting him out of his own head might just be the key to cracking him. His life’s too small. He was stall-bound before he came to us, and he’s been stall- and pen-kept since we got him. He could do with a vacation.” 

“Arthur, there’s no reason…” Jack started, but Arthur shook his head.

“I don’t know where either of you got the idea I wanted your opinion on this. The colt’s my work, and I never dreamed I’d not be able to do it because you wouldn’t both be there. Can you think of any reason why you can’t finish this job before you go riding off to war?”

“No. I can’t. When do we leave?”

“A couple of days. The horses can’t change on account of politics.”

“Fair enough,” Jack agreed. “Now if you’ll excuse me.”

He grabbed his notebook from his room and swept out the front door, Banjo at his heels. John whirled on Arthur.

“You think I can’t see through this?” 

“I figured you can. I don’t waste a lot of time trying to lie to you.” Arthur tried the half-grin, the little ribbing twinkle, that usually got him a reluctant smile back. John didn’t soften.

“This is my kid we’re talking about.”

Anger flared up in his chest, and Arthur chose not to analyze it. “What? Shit. I had no goddamned idea.”

“Go to hell.” 

John stomped out the front door, veered in the opposite direction from his son. Arthur dropped into the kitchen chair, absently rubbed at his aching, slightly swollen knee. His heart thudded against his ribcage, pounding faster in a pointless attempt to outbeat fear and anger.

He wondered how many other families across America were reading this morning’s paper and having variants on this same argument.

The Great War had finally reached out stateside and snatched peace from Lady Liberty’s tired hands. Arthur had been too young to remember the Civil War, though its reverberations still sounded across the South, a land locked forever in its antebellum dreams. But he remembered battered one-legged veterans, tired, bitter, angry men with the shakes whenever a gun went off. Half a million men had died across the battlefields of this land, and that had left behind too many widows and orphans for a nation to bear.

How many would fall across the ocean where the stakes were higher, the countries more numerous?

“Nothing good ever came from government interference,” Arthur growled. He picked the paper back up and reread the war correspondence more thoroughly, for it suddenly felt very personal.

  
  


* * *

  
  


They strung the horses in a long line, though Arthur hardly thought it necessary. They had trained the MacFarlane Ranch horses to see the big bay as their leader. He was a sturdy, cow-headed horse who made good decisions on his own. They would suggest to Bonnie that whoever was in charge of a drive ride him, and everything ought to go smoothly from there. Only Stubby maintained a careless ignorance of how to cut, but he had developed bravery through obedience. If a rider knew where to point and shoot, even Stubby could do it just fine.

The first leg of the journey was always the worst for them: a windy trail through mountains too short to be majestic and too tall to be easily traversed. Grim behaved like a lady for Jack, and Old Buell still had enough vigor for a few more of these long rides.

Arthur tried to bend the good Lord’s ear more than usual as he convinced Devil to keep a rider. The colt was packed dynamite beneath him, explosive and unstable. If Arthur had been in a mood to be grateful, he would have appreciated the way John and Jack kept looking over at him as a sign of affection. Instead their lack of confidence irritated him. 

He and John had barely spoken since their heated words in the kitchen. It was the worst kind of fight for two men who struggled with communication: neither of them rightly knew why they were mad at each other. They only knew that anger burned red-hot in their stomachs, and anger demanded hot words and cold shoulders.

“How’s he doing?” Jack took his turn to check on Arthur without any subtlety at all. Squealing, Devil snapped out at Grim. Arthur wheeled him up in a tight circle and widened the gap between horses. 

“Alright,” Arthur answered.

“Are you mad at him, or is he mad at you?” Jack asked. Arthur followed Jack’s gaze to John a hundred yards up the trail, straight as an arrow in the saddle, hat jammed down low against the whipping breeze. 

“I don’t rightly know.”

“It seems like you two should be talking to each other then.”

“Hey kid,” Arthur turned on a serious voice, raised his eyebrows. “How old are you?”

Jack took the hint. “Sorry I said anything.”

Arthur cussed himself for being an asshole when the trail silence went three ways instead of two. The storybook quiet of their lives had been shattered when Jack came down the driveway. This quiet instead bore the weight of the world on its shoulders. 

When they camped for the night, the horses tied down and the supplies secure, Arthur and John bedded down completely separately for the first time in years. They would have done it even if all had been well. Neither of them had said anything about their unusual arrangement in front of Jack, and if he suspected anything beyond brotherhood, he had said nothing.

Arthur found excuses to get up repeatedly to check the horses or tighten the packs. The empty space beside him threatened to swallow him if he stayed there.

Eventually, he fell asleep sitting up against a tree.

  
  


* * *

  
  


A sharp pain seared through Arthur and jolted him awake. He groaned. That pain was unnervingly familiar. He had felt it in his childhood bedroom, Lyle Morgan acting against the pleading voice of his sainted wife, and he had felt it at the hands of countless fools who thought it served as intimidation. It was the hard kick from pointy-toed boots. 

“Get up.” 

Arthur blinked the speaker into clarity. He looked like a kid playing dress-up in his daddy’s clothes, his bandana tied too carefully, his expression too pinched.

“You don’t want me to,” Arthur growled, rubbing his side. He assessed the situation. The young man standing over him had no gun in hand, but the comrade across camp had one trained directly on John, who had already gotten to this feet. Arthur didn’t see Jack; that absence made him proceed carefully. 

“Give me all the money you’ve got, and no one has to get hurt.”

Ignoring him, Arthur called across the camp to John. “You couldn’t have handled this?”

“I didn’t want to wake you up.” The lazy drawl carried more than its raspy growl; it confirmed what Arthur had assumed: John could have gotten a shot off ten times already. He was just waiting for more information. These boys weren’t exactly the Murfree Brood who had always deserved to be shot on sight.

“Mighty kind of you.” Arthur made no effort to move. “Where’s Jack?”

John snorted. “Between you brooding with the horses and him sneaking off with the lantern, it’s lucky we even had the time to sleep and get robbed.”

“Shut up!” The bandit with the gun shouted. His hand wavered. 

John moved first, taking the gun from the kid’s hand so fast he hardly had time to realize what had happened. Arthur unholstered the gun at his side and tried not to enjoy the tell-tale click coinciding with fresh fear on his robber’s face.

“Let’s try this again,” Arthur kept his tone neutral. “Is it just the two of you out robbing innocent folk?”

“Eat shit.”

Arthur popped him across the mouth with the back of his hand. “That’s not very nice. I asked a question, and I need an answer. I’ll get one, one way or another.”

The kid spat on the ground. “I’m not telling you nothing. Let us go or shoot us.”

The obvious embarrassment almost made Arthur sympathize. When he had been younger than these boys, he had tried to rustle cattle for the first time. He had seen beef prices and been seduced by dollar signs. Imagine his surprise when he successfully stole a herd and nearly as quickly discovered himself on a trail in the middle of nowhere with not a steer in sight. Within a few minutes, the white-headed rancher he had robbed had shown up on the trail, laughed at him from behind a shotgun, and set out to round his cattle back up. For a cocksure young man, there could be nothing worse than embarrassment at the hands of someone perceived as old.

“Get out of here,” Arthur said.

“If I hear anything about you boys hitting folks around here, I’m coming for you,” John said simply. “Robbing and rustling’s no way of life.”

The young men scrambled away. They had not even disappeared from view when a gunshot boomed through the night.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wow. This fic has gone by fast. I'm a little in shock that we're finally nearing its end. Just a couple more chapters.


	17. Campfires Again

Not more than a couple of hundred yards off, they found him.

“You’re going to be fine,” Jack’s voice spoke in quiet terror.

Jack knelt over a prone body, both arms extended, hands pressing desperately into a sternum. The body spasmed, shaking the panicking young man trying to hold its blood in. 

“Just stay calm. You’ll be fine.” Jack’s teeth chattered on the words.

The gun lay beside them, an accusation and confession all at once.

Arthur and John sprung to action, Arthur picking up the weapon and taking his place on the ground, John taking Jack by the shoulders and pulling him backward.

“Are you hurt?” John shook him. “What happened?”

The body on the ground was undoubtedly the third member of the amateur outlaws they had encountered. He couldn’t have been much older than Jack. Gutshot, his coughs came wet and weak, his eyes rolled back in his head. It was pageantry to try to save him -- anyone could see that -- but Arthur pushed hard on the gushing wound as if he could stop the bleeding. The boy’s lips moved in a wordless whisper.

If he were a praying man, Arthur might have tried to offer a few words to the person dying. Instead, he carefully angled himself so that if the boy managed to look up, his last view might be the stars rather than a crusty stranger.

“He had a gun.” Jack’s voice measured out each word slowly, tonelessly. “He was going to… I thought he was going to… I think he tried to shoot me.”

“‘Course he was,” John said. He dropped to the ground and released a long sigh. He found Arthur’s eye contact across the dark clearing. Arthur shook his head. “No other reason for him to have a gun.” 

“No one decent’s out robbing folk at gunpoint in the middle of the night,” Arthur confirmed, but the words tasted like ash. Those boys had been stupid, reckless. Maybe wicked but just as likely desperate. And now they would have the experience of burying one of their own for it. 

John closed his hand on Jack’s shoulder. They kept the required vigil: quiet, ugly, but quick. The wound was fatal. When a wheezing breath was finally followed with silence, Arthur spoke first.

“I’ll bury him. If we leave him out, the scavengers won’t leave nothing behind.”

In a rush of movement, Jack got back to his feet, shook his head. “No. I’ll do it.”

Both older men opened their mouths to argue and stopped at once. Jack stood taller than his father, chin stuck out, shoulders squared. Of course, Arthur wanted to do it for him. In Jack, he still saw the tiny baby who he had rocked to sleep, the sweet toddler who turned rocks into towers, the little boy who made flower necklaces for his mother. He could also see the man with bloody hands who had just made his first kill, a milestone many men would never face.

Arthur deferred first. “Sure.” 

“I can help,” John said.

“No.” Jack swallowed. Steadier, he spoke again. “I want to do it myself.”

“Okay.” 

Back at camp, Arthur and John stoked the fire and took seats there. Tonight wouldn’t see any more sleep.

“Jesus Christ.” John dropped his face into his hands. “I heard that gunshot and thought someone had shot him.”

In all likelihood, based on their experiences with his friends, Jack’s robber had not intended to shoot, just wanted to wave a gun around and scare some money out of someone. Yet even still, there must have been a moment where four hands shared one firearm in a game of tug-of-war where the loser died. Adrenaline kicked up, sent blood coursing through Arthur’s ears, just at the thought.

Somehow Jack had come out on top of a deadly scuffle. 

Arthur shrugged one shoulder. “He’s a Marston.”

The peace offering did its job, and John’s tension melted into something sadder, wearier. Arthur scooted closer. He took one of the rough hands from John’s face and threaded their fingers together. 

“He’ll be okay, John.”

“Didn’t enough of us die so he wouldn’t ever have to live like that?” His fingers twitched against Arthur’s, counting them out. “Mac, Jenny, Sean, Lenny, Susan, Hosea, Abigail… no one ever got their paradise in the West. Just you and me.”

If it weren’t for the leaden guilt in John’s sigh, Arthur would have smiled at the sentimentality.

“It was supposed to be him. Not me. And now you both are acting like I’m just supposed to let him go get himself blown up in another country.”

“We can’t stop him.” Arthur considered trying to explain more, put into words the idea that all those sacrifices had been so that Jack might live. Living meant making your own choices, being free. For Arthur, that might mean galloping under the open sky with no one chasing him. He didn’t know what it meant for Jack. He only knew that caging him to keep him safe was still trapping him. 

Maybe John couldn’t see that because Jack was his son. Arthur liked to think he would have made the same choice if it had been Isaac here with them. If that little cherubic child had been given the opportunity to grow into a man, he might have made stupid, reckless choices ending in his death, but Arthur would have had to accept that. A father had no right to live his son’s life.

John lifted his face and grunted. “I hate when you’re right.”

“I’m not so fond of it myself this time.”

Arthur slipped to his bag and got his journal. By the firelight, he spun out his thoughts, for once knowing exactly what he wanted to leave on the page. He wrote it out so he could see it, see the people in their names, two old ghosts come back to remind him of lessons learned. 

_ Lenny RIP _

_ Sean RIP _

_ 21 is not so young as I want to think. Jack is not protected by his youth. He reminds me of Lenny sometimes. That kid loved his books, too, and he was always proving himself. Jack does not remind me of Sean at all except that both of them are that kind of young where they still have cracks. Their personalities are like baby’s heads. Still growing in. Lenny and Sean never got to finish. _

_ I never forgave myself for their deaths. They were with me. My responsibility. But I think I learned the wrong lesson. The lesson wasn’t that I didn’t do enough. No one else could have done better. _

_ The lesson was that dangerous situations kill people. John and me had made our world so small we almost couldn’t lose anyone else. _

_ Now we can. _

* * *

  
  


Jack didn’t want to talk about it. He made that clear from his quiet return to camp and silent retreat to his bedroll. In the morning, he accepted a cup of coffee and a little salted venison with thanks but little else. Once they had packed and loaded, he offered to ride lead, even though that meant riding with the map in his fist. He had to unfold it frequently to confirm their way.

Neither of them pushed it. Arthur suspected his own nonchalance toward the whole thing was another indication he was still going to end up in Hell. Sure, a kid had died, but it wasn’t his kid, and it wasn’t his problem. He asked John how he was feeling about the whole thing. John’s surprised expression and quick shrug confirmed he was no more haunted.

Perhaps they had filled up on guilt and regret in their youth. There was no room left for more.

An amazing thing happened as they returned to the prairies. Jack began to remember his childhood, and he began to talk to Arthur and then, slowly, surely, to John too.

“I remember fishing around here,” he said as they passed the burbling river outside Blackwater. Roads had been cut through most of West Elizabeth at this point, but the old horse trails had been largely untouched, relics of a time already gone. “Ma and I hadn’t been at Beecher’s very long then, and Pa and I went fishing. I didn’t want to go.”

Arthur filled the silence of the pause. “I weren’t much of a fisherman until I got older. It bored me when I was young.”

Jack seemed to appreciate the out. “That might have been it. Rufus got bitten by a snake, but he was okay. He was my dog.”

“He was a good dog,” John said. “He could track elk, wolves. If you gave him a scent, he could get after it. Damndest thing I ever saw in a retriever.”

“No instinct though,” Jack added. “If you didn’t ask, he would sleep on a porch all day every day.”

“Not unlike Uncle,” John said.

“I wonder what happened to Uncle,” Jack said. “When we were taken, he was in town, and we never found him when we got out.”

“He was such a tough old turkey I wouldn’t be surprised if he is just fine.”

“Probably holed up in a saloon somewhere preserving himself in whiskey and telling stories of his adventures in Africa,” Arthur said, enjoying a tall tale it didn’t hurt to spin. 

They made excellent time, only needing to camp one more night. John convinced Jack to go out with him, see if they could take down a deer and put some fresh meat on the fire. Arthur watched them go and took the quiet as an excuse to butter up the Devil. He curried the colt, keeping a wary eye out for snapping teeth, and picked out his hooves while avoiding any quick strikes.

“You’re never gonna be any good for your folks, are you?” Arthur murmured. He held out an oatcake on his flattened palm. Devil snatched it up. “You’re barely any good for me, and I about half know what I’m doing.”

The colt nudged him with his nose. Arthur obliged with a peppermint from his satchel.

John and Jack returned with two rabbits. The meat was tough, stringy, but a pinch of thyme from Arthur’s satchel gave it good flavor. They ate it fresh with potatoes from the supplies while Arthur wondered what the tight expression on Jack’s face portended. 

Jack waited until both men had their hands dirty and mouths full before he asked his question.

“We lived like this when I was little, didn’t we?”

“Sure,” Arthur said. “We didn’t have much choice.”

A pause stretched out, Arthur expecting more, a follow-up question or two, but Jack kept his thoughts to himself. It was only after some whiskey, some silence, and some more whiskey that the conversation opened back up. 

“What’d you do in the evenings like this when it got too dark to read? Did you talk?”

“Most nights,” John said while Arthur considered the question. The last place a camp had really been a home had been almost twenty years ago at Horseshoe Overlook. Sure, they had lost the Callendar boys by then, and sweet Jenny, but the rest of them had been alive, still brimming with the belief of a way out. The donation box had needed to be emptied several times a day. Everything from bat wings to gold bands had been carefully cataloged in Strauss’s books.

Arthur had hated that old moneylender, but now he could look back from a new perspective, could see how Strauss’s way had been no worse than theirs. Strauss took advantage of people who had at least some semblance of a choice. A man in a bank lobby who soiled himself on the giving end of a pistol certainly hadn’t had any at all.

Irony worked its own magic though. Thinking himself righteous, Arthur had expelled Strauss from camp. That action might just have saved the Austrian from dying on that mountain.

John might not consider Horseshoe Overlook with the same fondness. It had been the height of him and Abigail fighting. At any time, day or night, one might have heard the rumblings of their hot anger, hissing at first before boiling over into yelling. John had spent too much time stumbling around drunk, hiding from his angry wife and deflecting good advice from Hosea.

It wasn’t surprising if John had felt like a cornered animal then. Arthur, too, had been one of the snapping beasts, ready to lash out at Marston’s every flaw. Even now, if he thought about it, Arthur could still taste the acidic betrayal that had flavored his every sip and chaw for two years.

“Some of the folks liked to get singing going,” John said. “Arthur never knew enough of the words to start things off.”

“That ain't exactly true,” Arthur lied. Jack smiled.

“Cowboy folk songs are popular in New York right now. There is a cowboy who performs on the roof of the Victoria Theatre. I don’t remember his name, but he has a following, so other places are trying to make money off it too.”

“I doubt they know any of the good ones,” Arthur said. Sean MacGuire had been one of the best, and his poor, sweet-and-sour Karen had been the other. Sean knew all the bawdiest songs, had even taught dirty ditties to Uncle. More than that, he had never missed a word, never forgot what came next. 

Arthur added, “And I’m not going to be the one to teach them to you.”

“I can’t sing anyway,” Jack said. “I courted a girl for a while, and she expected love songs and flowers. I didn’t have the eye or ear for either one.”

“Abigail had a terrible voice, and John’s is no better,” Arthur said. “You come by it honest.”

“Hey now.” John took a swig from the bottle. “You pick the tune, and I’ll keep up.”

Arthur tilted his head. “Really?”

“If you can remember the words, old man.”

Challenges must always be accepted. Arthur removed his hat with a flourish, hung it on his knee, and cleared his throat. In the firelight, John’s eyes sparkled with their amusement, brown flecked with borrowed sparks. 

There were not many songs of the old days he could do from memory. He motioned for the whiskey bottle, downed two shots’ worth, and raised it to the Marstons.

_ “Oh Whiskey, you villain, you’ve been my downfall.” _

_ “You’ve kicked me and cuffed me and caused me to brawl.” _

Their voices wound together without the support of Javier’s guitar, Pearson’s accordion, Dutch’s beloved gramophone. Arthur bobbled on the second verse, and John took it over for a few seconds, carrying the words his friend had lost. A cool breeze, a hint of coming fall, whipped through the camp. 

_ “I’ve rambled and trampled this wide world around, raising hell with the gang that’s where I am bound,” _Arthur sang. Goosebumps sprang to life on his arms and legs, the spirits of a dozen voices suddenly in his head with him, tempting him to remember only the good times. They would have all lifted their bottles at that line, whooped and hollered, grinned like hyenas. 

He let the ghosts lead, and when they finished the song, they went through it, line by line, again and again, until finally, young Jack joined in. 

They taught him two more songs before tongues and eyes got heavy. 

Tucked into his bedroll, Arthur had the strange feeling something had been completed. Never one to question satisfaction, he drifted right to sleep.


	18. Visitors

  
  


Bonnie MacFarlane made over both the cowponies and Jack with the same steady exuberance. She clapped him on the shoulders like a man, told him she thought a lot of his father, and put him to work helping the lads with the branding. Nonplussed, Jack swung to look at John and Arthur. They shrugged and let him be sent away to do hard labor. 

“He’s not as soft I’d have thought a city boy would be,” Bonnie said as she rejoined them on the porch. She dropped unceremoniously into one of the new rockers. “Sarah Grace rode to Armadillo with her daddy, and I’m at a bit of a loss as to what to do with my hands. Motherhood keeps them so busy you forget how to have leisure. How’re my horses?”

They took full advantage of a night at MacFarlane Ranch: confiding in Bonnie about Abigail’s death and Jack’s unexpected entrance into their lives, eating saucy meat sandwiches they didn’t have to cook, and offering Jack the horrid storage room bed while they opted for blankets on the barn floor near the horses. Buell and Grim seemed appreciative, Devil ambivalent. They left Jack by the campfire, flirting with a young blonde to great success.

Bonnie made her way out while they were still brushing down the horses and chatting. She cut right to the chase.

“I got a letter from the U.S. government today. It listed some of my youngest hands by name, demanded they go to the nearest office to enlist.”

“They aren’t kidding about this damn war,” John groused. Arthur listened while he worked a snarl out of Grim’s tale. His fingers were a little stiff.

“No. They expect to have a beef supply for an army even as they strip us ranchers of any way to produce it.”

“I’ve never known the federal government to have much sense in how they handle business.”

“It’s a wonder how they have time to track down a few hard-working kids with all their bulldogging after old outlaws.”

“Still?” Arthur turned to look.

“Yes sir. They just had it in the paper that they’d gotten Bill Williamson himself. Hanged him in Blackwater.”

She couldn’t know, of course. To her, this was just news, adjacent to them, relevant to them, but not painful. 

Old Bill Williamson. He had probably gotten heavier in his old age, slower, more careless. Bill hadn’t been dumb, not exactly, but he had always wanted someone to think for him, had always craved a leader he never needed to question. He hadn't found it in the army, and when he'd gone looking for it in the world of outlaws, he'd struck out again. He just didn't know it soon enough. 

In the final weeks of the van der Linde gang, Bill’s hands had gotten so shaky he could barely use them at camp. Javier had taken to quietly cleaning his guns for him. That had been the closest anyone got to caring. There had been so many bigger issues to worry about.

And yet Bill had been as much a part of it as any of them, terrified of losing faith, scared to see a world on the other side of Dutch’s plans. Arthur bet Bill had never recovered. Standing at the gallows, Marion Williamson probably hadn’t feared death as much as he had feared that which he had already survived.

“Poor bastard,” John said. 

“Has Jack registered?”

“No.” 

Arthur knew that tone anywhere. John was gearing up for a fight.

Bonnie plowed ahead. “Don’t you think you’re the last person in the world who needs the federal government poking around?”

“Watch it, Bonnie.” Arthur’s voice was low, a warning she wouldn’t heed. 

“Did he come to you to hide from the draft?”

“He came to tell me my wife died.” 

“And then he stayed, why? You weren’t exactly in his life. Why hasn’t he gone home? What’s he running from?”

John turned to steel. He pressed his lips together, seemed to swallow his anger. “It’s none of your goddamned business, Ms. Walters. Have a nice night.”

He turned his hat tip into a gesture equal to spitting in her eye and left the barn. Arthur stopped combing the same spot in Grim’s tail, slipped her a sugar cube, and took up the mantle here. John might appreciate a few minutes to recollect his thoughts, puzzle back together his defense mechanisms that kept him from asking the same questions Bonnie had. 

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Arthur asked. He lifted the lantern from its perch on a barrel to one of the hanging hooks instead. In its sudden light, the new lines of Bonnie’s face stood stark against her still youthful features. Some new, heavy worries had aged her. 

“Do you really think his kid crossed the country to share some news with a father he barely remembers?”

Of course not. Of course, he didn’t think that. The first days, he had listened to the constant nagging voice suggesting an ulterior motive, but after a time, it just felt better to believe in redemption. Whatever the reason he had come, whatever the reason he had stayed, Arthur knew why Jack was here now: these two men were letting him be whoever he was.

Abigail and Wallace had been the most supportive parents a young law student could have. The only problem Arthur could see was that Jack was more than half outlaw, and there was a wild, stubborn, stupid streak a mile wide in him. 

“It doesn’t matter to John, I’ll say that much.” Arthur shrugged. “And you even suggesting he should force his kid off to war to save his own skin is an insult.”

“A kid he…” Bonnie began.

“Don’t you say one word about things you don’t know anything about. He never left Jack when he had a choice,” Arthur said. It almost felt true. “And all that leaving doesn’t matter now.”

“I’m sorry.” 

“I’m not the one owed your apology.”

“I’m giving it to you too. You’ve bristled up like a wild hog, but you’re my friend. If you think I’ve hurt John, that won’t be true.”

Maybe she knew him even better than he had thought. “Apology accepted.”

She straightened up, brushed dirt and hay from her pants. “Now I’d better go find John and tell him I don’t even care if he wants to risk his neck over all this.”

“You’d better practice that a few times in a mirror if you’re hoping to sound convincing.”

She slipped to him, leaning up to press a kiss on his weathered cheek. “You got it, cowpoke.”

He never knew what Bonnie said, what humble pie she cooked up and ate, to ease John’s load. When the cowboy returned to the barn, he tossed himself into the makeshift bed beside Arthur, a half-grin on his face.

“Listen. You hear that?”

The horses snuffed softly in the corral outside the barn except for Devil who munched at hay in his stall. No one else seemed awake in the whole world, the usually busy ranch gone silent in the unseasonably cool night.

“I don’t hear anything,” Arthur whispered.

“Right.” John buried his nose into Arthur’s neck and sighed from his toes. “We’re alone.”

Arthur curled his hand at John’s hip, scratched his fingers through the muscular dent of his outer thigh. His heartbeat kicked up to a new urgent beat.

“It’s been a few days,” Arthur said.

“Are you worrying I can't keep up?” 

Before Arthur could respond, John whispered reassurance in his ear, shared a little story of stroking himself in the trees beside camp just yesterday morning.

Arthur groaned. It might not be John who wouldn’t last.

  
  


* * *

  
  


John Marston could not face anything with silence if his life depended on it. In a firefight, he leaped from cover just to flout the enemy with his ego. When he tracked a bounty, he called out his own name as if to brand his success or failure. And when he made love, he created a symphony of moans, exclamations, and dirty pleas.

In the barn of a ranch asleep for the night, they must keep quiet, for these salt of the earth people worked hard and would not understand. They discussed the necessity before beginning, big-talked about their own capacity for silence.

Now Arthur took full advantage. 

“You’ve got a lot of clothes on,” Arthur said casually. “I think you ought to remedy that.” 

John shrugged out of his pants, but Arthur shook his head, raised both eyebrows. 

“Jesus, Arthur. We’re in a barn, and it ain’t ours.”

“I don’t care.” Arthur’s voice was husky.

John stripped down to nothing. Arthur pulled their jar of Vaseline from his satchel and slicked his fingers up. He watched John watch him. Taking his time made it all the more intoxicating how rapt John was: his lips parted, his eyes wide, his palms flat on the floor supporting his weight. 

Arthur nudged him backward, kissed the jut of his chin on the way down, and on the way down when John reached for the buttons of Arthur’s pants, he batted his hands away. Instead, fully clothed except for his hat, Arthur tilted John’s hips up and went to work. 

He turned breathing into panting and panting into soft, pitiful moaning. 

“Hush, Marston,” Arthur said when he finally pushed his cock through the tight opening. John whimpered back a moan as Arthur worked his fist and hips in unison.

They rarely did this. The power balance of their youth never made its way into their bodies. But tonight, the fabric of his pants still rubbing the base of his cock while John writhed below him, naked and vulnerable, Arthur reveled in it. He could make John Marston do anything he wanted, and yet this was enough. To simply use his own body to create sweet pleasure for John was all he wanted.

It was John’s climax that soared through him, his own only a soft closing. 

They lay collapsed together on top of the bedroll, arms and legs sprawled. Arthur bent his arm up to twine his fingers into John’s hair. 

John drew in a shuddery breath. “You son of a bitch.” 

“I’ll get naked next time,” Arthur drawled. 

If they were younger men, next time might have been right then. Instead, John put his union suit back on and rolled over to put his head on Arthur’s chest. They let the lust quietly transform into sleepiness. 

“I once saved this barn from a fire,” John said. 

Arthur didn’t even open his eyes. “Yeah?”

A snore was the only answer. Arthur laid there a long time, listening to the soft sound. A war in Europe felt impossible in the quiet peace of this barn. His brain spun over what he would write in his journal if he were not too tired and happy to move:

_ If other men knew this was out here, the world might not be at war. They would stay home. _

* * *

_ _

The journey home took less than a week even with some inclement weather. On the second night, Jack woke John up to talk. With his back turned, Arthur eavesdropped on a son asking his father for help. They talked about death. The young robber buried somewhere along this trail weighed heavily on Jack. Perhaps enlistment and thoughts of war did too.

But Arthur’s turn to bear part of this burden came in the morning. In the pale light, Jack bent over his little book, scribbling away with his ink pen. But rather than writing directly on the page, he had several sheets of paper tucked inside instead.

When he realized Arthur was awake, Jack snapped his book shut. He snatched the pot from the fire without covering his hand first and poured a cup of coffee from the percolator. 

“Here.” 

“Thanks,” Arthur said. He watched the wisps of steam curl above the pitch-black liquid. Jack’s nervous energy was its own presence.

“I filled out the enlistment paperwork. I got the forms from one of Ms. Walters’ ranch hands. He is going to head further West to avoid it, so he didn’t need it.”

“But you do.” It was neither question nor statement.

“I have to go. It wouldn’t be right not to.”

Arthur said nothing. He licked a drop of coffee from the rim of the cup.

Jack continued, “I like it here. You have this house in the middle of nowhere, and everything is quiet. You can always see the stars. I could stay. Today wouldn’t be bad. Tomorrow might be okay. But eventually, there will be a world on the other side of this war, and I wouldn’t fit into it. I’d be a man who missed it, and I’d be alone.”

How did Jack manage to understand something so mysterious so easily? John had assumed youthful ignorance as the reason the boy wanted to go. Arthur had instead suspected some sort of moral compass pointing due North. But no, Jack just understood that every person must be a product of his time or suffer the consequences. 

“Then we’d best get you back.” 

Once John had woken up and camp had been broken, they finished out the last stretch to home. Devil pranced and bucked without any marked improvement, determined to prove himself the most stubborn colt Arthur had ever encountered. 

Coming down the driveway, Arthur always remembered that first day he nervously showed John what he had built. In his own stupid fumbling way, he had gotten something so right. His heart turned a silly somersault.

Then he saw a second car in the driveway.

“We’ve become a highway without even putting up a sign,” John groused.

There was a man on the porch, clambering out of one of the chairs, Banjo’s tail thumping on the railing beside him. His tailored suit gave him away before Jack did.

“Dad?”


	19. Greetings and Goodbyes

Wallace greeted the men as if their simple homestead belonged to him, smile wide and hands outstretched. His was the only face without shock lurking at the corners, Jack’s surprise in his eyes, John’s in the stern lines around his mouth. Arthur knew his own would be in the lines of his forehead deepening even as he tried to look neutral. They dropped wordlessly off their horses.

“Hello, gentlemen. My name’s Wallace Leocor. You must be the men who have employed my son, Jack.”

Arthur accepted the handshake without words. The grip was firm, serious, though the skin itself was soft in his own leathery palms. To his credit, John Marston managed to do the same thing.

“What are you doing here?” Jack’s voice frayed at the edges.

“I want to ask you the same question. The semester has begun.”

Jack frowned. “I’m not a law student anymore.”

Only now did Wallace’s face flicker, a hint of annoyance appearing under the congenial manners. “May we have a moment please?”

Arthur found a way to nudge his elbow into John and spoke for both of them. “We’ll take care of the horses, Jack.”

Jack handed over Grim’s reins, gratitude in his eyes. They walked to the barn, just made it inside before John lost control of his silence.

“I can’t believe he’s here.” His voice was hard as steel. “That man took my wife and child.”

It was an unfair accusation, for Wallace had never known the truth. He had met a widow and a surly adolescent and chosen them for a comfortable life. He had been a blessing for two people who had never known the outlaw trying to find his way back to them. That same outlaw had given his wife and child away without a fight, just to give them a better life. 

“Calm down.”

“I never thought I’d have to see him,” John said. He unbridled Buell too forcefully, earned himself a vicious snort. “I never thought I’d have to know.”

Now, this was fair. In the shadowy mystery, John had likely been unable to imagine anything, but now he knew the face of the man who had come to his wife in a marriage bed. He knew the man who had knelt at her deathbed, holding his son’s hand as he said goodbye to his little wife. 

Arthur couldn’t worry about that right now. Instead, he needed to focus on stabilizing John before they walked back out there. Jack had every right to keep this secret handed down from him to his mother. More than that, they had just heard the word of Bill Williamson, hanged in a public display. Of course, the federal agency would love nothing more than to prove its own value by resurrecting two old enemies just to execute them. 

It was no time to give their names to a prominent businessman.

“You just have to…” Arthur began.

John cut him off. “I know what I have to do.”

When they turned the horses loose in the pasture, Arthur watched Devil wheel out alongside Grim and Buell. The colt galloped a few laps, his hooves a whirling fury, but once his breathing quickened, he slowed. He trotted to Grim, nosed her in the shoulder, tried to induce her to play. She ignored him without signs of irritation, so he set to Buell. He induced the Cremello into a lope, their shoulders bumping together, their snorts in time with their hooves.

“You’re gonna keep that damn colt,” John said, following his gaze. 

“Can’t afford him.”

“His owners don’t know anything about him. He’ll end up useless on the track and getting slaughtered for dog food. We’ll find the money.”

Arthur wanted to be grateful. He did want to keep the colt, had grown attached to him, liked seeing the small, tiny signs of progress each day adding up to a better mount. But he worried John was speaking in metaphors, and Jack was no colt, not theirs to keep. 

He was always going to leave. That was how this story was supposed to go.

  
  


* * *

  
  


At the dinner table, they found themselves an unusual foursome, no one speaking the truth, the air between them all thick with secrets and frustrations. They ate between their stares. Arthur itched to try to draw the scene, this urban father trying to peer past the scruffy beard and deep tan to his lawyer-child underneath, this rural father trying to see something redeeming in a man he had reason to hate. 

After the stew had been eaten, he poured Kentucky bourbon neat as if the searing liquor could help, as if he were some kind of idiot who had forgotten just what alcohol could do. John drained his glass in a gulp and tapped it on the table, motioned for another. Arthur obliged. 

“Jack here told us your wife died this year. Our condolences,” John said. Jack’s head shot up.

“Thank you.” Wallace swallowed his whiskey too, an undeniable shadow crossing his face. “She was a wonderful woman.”

“I bet.” John waved a flippant hand, but Wallace didn’t seem to notice. 

“I have spent the last year trying to keep my head down,” Wallace said to the bottom of his glass. “All of my friends and associates have offered to help, but none of them understood Abigail. She was not a city girl.”

Arthur’s chest ached. He saw Abigail under the morning sunrise, plaid coat pulled tight around her body, cup of coffee in her hand, little Jack at her skirts. She could look out over an entire vista back then, see a landscape made by Mother Nature without a soul to interrupt it. 

“Want to talk about her?” Some of the edge fell away from John’s voice, and Arthur knew his thoughts had lost their footing too. 

“I think maybe I do.” Wallace chuckled and looked up from his glass at Jack. “If that’s okay with you.”

Jack nodded. 

“I met her at Grand Central Station. She was at the counter trying to get her baggage without a claim ticket. She was so lovely and so spirited. The man at the counter tried so hard to brush her aside, but she would not budge without knowing where to find her things. I stepped in to help, and I expected her to be offended, but she was so grateful.”

Arthur watched the littlest bit of a smile appear at the corner of Jack’s mouth.

Jack said, “I got back from trying to hail a taxi, and Ma said she had found the only gentleman in the city, and if I was going to be rude and surly to him, I might as well just get back on the train and make my own way in the world.”

“Your father had died so recently, and you had just endured a cross-country move. You were never deliberately rude,” Wallace said charitably. “I think I fell in love with her at once. I shocked everyone. I had never been married before, you see, but I asked Abigail within the month. I never regretted it. She was a wonderful wife, and she brought me a son, something I had started to think I would never have.”

Jack glanced at John, tried to change the subject. “Dad…”

Wallace didn’t seem to hear. “Abigail loved blue dresses and Oriental cuisine. She could befriend anyone except for my business partners' wives. She found them insufferable. Then you would look out and she would be helping the colored women do laundry in the alley even though we had paid them to do it or she would be giving sugar cubes to the carriage horses.”

Arthur reached under the table and touched John’s knee, grateful he was not able to say anything aloud because he had no idea what words to offer. Did it help John to hear the love in this gentle voice, so unlike his own? Or did it hurt so much worse to know Abigail had been cherished in true marriage of the heart, not mere economic convenience? Wallace could have mentioned his wife’s illiteracy, her ignorance of social graces, her mysterious background, but no, he thought of her blue dresses. 

Arthur squeezed John’s knee one more time before returning his hand to its proper place on its glass.

Wallace continued, “I miss her every day. I thought selling the apartment and moving would help, but it has only made it worse. Especially once Jack left.”

“I had to go,” Jack said.

“And I understood. You needed time on your own, but now you have to get back to your classes.”

“It doesn’t matter. I’m going to enlist before I’m drafted.”

“That’s not necessary.”

“I’m surprised they even started the semester. Everyone will be headed off to war.”

Wallace shook his head. “Not all of them. I do not think the young men in colleges and universities around the nation will have to go. Our leaders know we cannot risk our educated future on some battlefield in Ypres.”

“So a lawyer’s worth more than a ranch hand?” It took Arthur a second to realize he was the one who spoken so gruffly. Three surprised faces stared at him.

“That’s not exactly what I…” Wallace started. Then he stopped. “I apologize.”

“Sure.” Arthur stood up and set to work clearing the table, buzzing with anger he didn’t understand. He scrubbed the remnants of sorghum sauce from each plate in the washbasin.

“Surely neither of you gentlemen want to see this young man go off to war. If you’ve spent any length of time with him, you know he is bound for better things.”

Arthur heard the shuffle of John pushing his chair back, rising to his feet. The barometric pressure in the room dropped yet again.

“I think if the boy’s father were here,” John spoke evenly, carefully, “he would want him to make his own decision. He’d support him doing what needs to be done. Hell, he’d be proud of him.”

“I would think any father would want to see his son safe,” Wallace said stiffly.

The subject veered after that, turning North for safer topics, and when the dishes were done, Wallace made his way back to Strawberry for the night. Jack agreed to meet him there in the morning to talk further.

So tonight, they continued with the bottle of bourbon, busted out a deck of cards, and showed young Jack Marston how to lose at poker.

“I think they play for cigarettes in the army,” Arthur said as he checked on a pair of 8s. John never blinked a second time, never raised his eyebrows even a millimeter. Arthur had no idea if he had nothing or a royal flush. Jack, meanwhile, telegraphed his every decision before he made it. 

“Or sticks if everyone is poor. It probably has that in common with prison.”

“What do you know about prison?” Jack grumbled irritably as he laid down a 5 high and handed over his money again.

“How to take every prisoner there for all his sticks.” John shrugged.

“You’ve been in prison?”

It was a crossroads, a moment that could be painful and difficult or could be light and frothy. They’d had enough heavy lately, Arthur figured. They kept playing as they talked.

“John got himself picked up in a bank robbery. I had to get him out along with Sadie Adler. You’ll remember her, I expect?”

Jack laughed. “Ma said she was the craziest woman she ever knew. She helped you build our ranch.”

“Not so much with the lifting and the hammering, but she sure did. Her bounty business earned us the funds to stay afloat.”

A flicker of jealousy warmed Arthur through better than any fire. When John had told him Sadie had taken off for South America after taking down Micah, he had been happy for her, even though it was too many years later for that to matter. She would never again have to travel familiar trails without her Jakey. She was on a brand new adventure. Still, he envied Jack, seeing her on the other side of her crucible. 

“Anyway, John got himself arrested, and Sadie had a plan to try to find him. She hires this hot air balloon to take me up over the penitentiary so I can see everything. Only the whole thing ends up crashing down in the river. All while John here gets three hots a day and apparently plays poker for sticks.”

Jack’s eyes lit up like he was a child. “A hot air balloon? Is he making that up?”

“I wish I knew,” John said. “If it’s a delusion, it’s one he’s held onto for a long time.”

“It’s true. You pull on this little cord to get it to rise and then release it so it will sink.”

Jack teased, “What do you do to make it crash in the river?” 

“Have a slew of O’Driscolls fill it with lead,” Arthur replied. He scooped up the coins he had just won with three 2s and ignored John’s irritated snort. “Damn, maybe you’d better pay attention, fellas.”

But before long, Arthur lost a few too many coins a few too many hands in a row. He realized too late Jack’s expressive faces no longer matched his betting, no longer matched the hand he laid out at the end.

“Son of a bitch.”

The Marston men busted him before turning on each other. 

  
  


* * *

  
  


The three men stood on the porch, the sunrise barreling over the horizon, the chill in the air nipping at their noses and fingertips. For once, no one had made it out to the barn yet to check on the horses. They had gotten up early from their respective beds and then moved slowly. 

Arthur had wrapped up salted venison and some biscuits in a clean handkerchief, tied it in a trail bundle. John had tucked in the loved, warped old photograph of him and Abigail in a Blackwater photo study. His had fingers trembled a bit, almost reached back in to pull it out before Arthur could tie it up. 

“Boy probably has a picture of his mother already,” John had said.

“But not his father.” Arthur refused to hear any pretense this morning. “He’ll be real glad to have it.”

Now Jack took the offered bundle. He had pressed his suit and shaven himself squeaky clean. It had only been a few weeks ago when he had driven up looking just like this. His automobile grunted and purred in the driveway.

“I’ll write. I don’t know what the timeline is from enlistment to anything else, but I’ll write often.”

“You have the address,” Arthur said. “We’ll be here.”

He hugged Arthur first, coming in quickly as he thought he might be rejected. They held on a few beats too long, and when they parted, Arthur patted Jack’s smooth cheek roughly.

“You should have kept the beard. It hid the babyface.”

“Don’t let that colt kill you.” 

With a lump in his throat, Arthur watched Jack turn to John. He had lived through the long months of John’s search for his son, listened to so many campfire stories about who the youngest Marston had been becoming. Then he had lived through the years of silence when the name had been all but taboo, a loss too painful and complex to be faced.

He had stood in the barn a few yards from here a few weeks ago to hear Jack remind him of all John’s failures as a father.

His heart threatened to burst now watching them hold onto each other, hearing the man whisper, “Don’t do anything stupid,” and the boy wear his heart on his sleeve for once and whisper back, “I won’t, Pa. I promise.”

John placed his hat on Jack’s head before he walked away.

The car pulled out of the driveway, and their world fell quiet again.

  
  


* * *

  
  


John took his rifle from the wall and went hunting. It was a dangerous time of year to still hunt on foot, bears starting to forage for winter weight, but Arthur understood the desire to be alone. He wouldn’t mind a few minutes to miss Jack on his own either. He had the uncomfortable sensation he had no right to be as sad as he was, a nagging voice in the back of his head reminding him whose son Jack wasn’t.

He took care of the chores and then started a fire in the fireplace. Banjo dragged in bones from a bird carcass he had found somewhere, but he carefully hung by the door in hopes of being unseen. Arthur should shoo him out but didn’t have the heart. 

“You better finish it all, pup,” was all he said. 

He picked up the book of T.S. Eliot poetry he had promised to give a try. He hated it. He put his reading glasses on and spent time with his own journal instead. 

When it got dark outside, he rustled up a pan of cornbread and some beans. He pulled Tabasco sauce out of the cupboard to douse all over his bowl. 

John didn’t come back, even when the night was black as pitch and steady, droning rain began to fall. 

There were a dozen or more reasons he might not be back, most of them benign and only a few of them bad, but the bad ones cried out the loudest. Arthur put on a heavy coat and his hat to head outside. Banjo followed with a low, reluctant growl. 

He checked the chicken coop. The hens had cozied down inside. It only took one look at the paddock to see the horses standing together under the run-in. Grim and Buell had their heads tucked together against the fence, Devil stood a little apart staring right back at Arthur like a sentinel.

The barn was dark, no lanterns lit, but Arthur pulled one down from the hook, fired it up, and checked anyway. John wasn’t there.

With no other options left, Arthur made his way to the edge of the tree line and started walking. In the stinging rain, he stared at a muddy ground devoid of footprints, all evidence washed away in the deluge. He made a guess and started walking.

Tracking always brought to mind Charles Smith. That man had been able to kneel down, see what no one else could, and follow it for miles. Arthur had believed it was the Indian blood when the man first joined the gang, had even ignorantly asked that question as the man sat on an overturned crate crafting arrows.

“Excuse me?” Charles had asked. Arthur had repeated the question. 

Charles had always had many silences. At the time, Arthur had not yet known this one, but he recognized it now in hindsight: disbelief that anyone could be so ignorant. 

“Yes, Arthur, I smell the animals on the wind and go where it tells me.”

“Alright.” Arthur had been embarrassed. 

“How do white men do it? What powers does your blood give you?”

He supposed he had gotten off lucky though. In the months that followed, he had seen Charles throw men to the ground for less. 

The memories of a friend who had lived through it all and may very well be married and happy in the great North should have soothed him, but they stood at odds with the growing fear in the pit of his stomach. 

He searched for two hours until his soggy lantern gave up its last flickering flame and his boots leaked water from inside with each step. In his head, he calculated the walk back to the house, the time spent changing clothes and maybe sitting just a few minutes by the fire to warm up his rapidly stiffening knees. He needed to be quick. If John was out here somewhere, the rain and cold heightened potential danger.

But when Arthur got back to the house and opened the front door, John was there, sitting by the fireplace, his leg elevated on a footstool. He had an empty bowl beside him, already licked clean by a spoiled Banjo. 

John said, “Where were you? I was worried.”

The sweet stupid relief made it impossible for him to feel anything else. Arthur mumbled out some half-hearted question. The adrenaline he had been keeping in check coursed through his veins in a flood.

“Twisted my ankle in a hole, and I was nearer to the road than the house. I just hitched a ride here with a passing wagon. Barely made it on before the rain started.”

“So you’ve been back a while?” It was an unnecessary question, another slipped mumble.

“Yeah.” John looked concerned as if he were finally really seeing Arthur for the first time since he walked in. “Jesus, you’re soaking wet. I figured you was out in the barn or something.”

“I was looking for you,” Arthur said, a touch of stubbornness coming into his voice. He didn’t love the way John’s face turned sympathetic, knowing. It did feel silly now, looking at John warm and snug by the fire, perfectly fine. There really hadn’t been any reason to panic, to go dragging his ass out into a cold rainstorm to look for a man a decade younger. 

“I was alright,” John said, and the gentleness undid something in Arthur. He made his way over, knelt down on the ground, and wrapped his arms around John. He tossed his hat on the couch and buried his dripping wet head into John’s chest. To his credit, John gave a little grunt at the sudden cold and damp but held on tight. “Hey, I was always alright.”

How many times had they ridden out in their youth without even bothering to say goodbye, without even telling a soul where they were going? They had trusted so recklessly, finding each other in jail cells, doctor’s offices, or roadsides whenever convenient. They had been too stupid to realize they could lose each other forever. Arthur missed that blissful ignorance right now.

“I want to die first,” he said.

“Excuse me?”

“We’re going to die someday, correct?”

“I ain’t stupid. I know we’re going to die,” John said. Arthur liked that touch of irritation, the little growl in that hoarse voice, almost as much as he’d disliked the sympathy.

“Then I insist on dying first.”

“Any particular date you’d like me to put on my calendar?” John asked.

“Nah, we can give it a while,” Arthur said. 

They stayed like that until Arthur could no longer bear his wet clothes. He got up and went to change into dry, warm clothes. When he got back out to the living room, he poured them both some late night coffee and took a look at Marston’s ankle: just a sprain, nothing to worry over. 

“You okay?” Arthur finally asked, and they both knew it had nothing to do with the ankle.

“Now you’ve got me so I don’t know whether to worry more about Jack getting himself killed out there or you dying on me,” John said. “So I’ve been better.”

“Me too,” Arthur said. He reached over to close the gap between them, folding his hand into John’s. They watched the fire burn out, chatting about nothing, sipping their coffee, pretending nothing loomed big enough to cast shadows over right now.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So there's an epilogue after the next final chapter that I just can't decide about. On one level, I love it because epilogues make saying goodbye easier. But in other ways, is it cheap storytelling where I won't just leave well enough alone? I'm still deciding. 
> 
> Either way, though, I'm so close to finished revising that I would say this Christmas week will see the posting of the rest of this fic. <3


	20. Journals

They returned to work. They had always been hard workers, dedicated to the jobs they had selected for themselves: first, outlaws, and now horse wranglers. The world seemed just as it had since they moved to this little slice of Big Valley. But as the weeks slipped by, the war came to even this remote corner of the United States. 

Kilkenny Cross’s owners sent a telegram, requesting that the Callahans find a buyer for the colt, for wartime was no time to start a new racer. John sent the money before even showing the telegram to Arthur.

In town, people buzzed about sons, nephews, grandchildren bearing off to “the front.” Arthur suspected most of the speakers had no idea what that actually meant. He and John knew little themselves, though they had taken to reading the paper more closely, had spent time trying to figure out just what it meant that this war had “taken to the trenches.”

They heard nothing from Jack. They didn’t know whether to be worried about that or not.

It was a Thursday, late in the afternoon, when Arthur had a wagon full of supplies that he first saw him. The officer stood near the train station, a swanky structure still boasting its “Welcome to Strawberry’s Newest Amenity” in spite of being almost six years old. He had shiny boots and a uniform with sharp, starched creases. 

Arthur knew he had no reason to walk over. It was silly to strike up a conversation. He did it anyway.

“Hey there,” he greeted. The officer nodded, pleasantly neutral, but then realized Arthur was approaching him, starting a conversation.

“Hello.”

He was younger up close, no more than 25, and any authority in the set of his shoulders was feigned. Arthur must look like an old man to this officer as much as he looked like a kid to him.

“I’ve got some questions for you if you have a minute,” Arthur said. 

“I do. How can I help you?” His formal tone was friendly.

“Name’s Arthur Callahan.” 

“Second Lieutenant Monroe at your service.”

Arthur couldn’t resist. “Any relation to Lyndon Monroe? He used to be a Captain in parts not too far from here.” 

“No, sir, not that I know of.” 

“I figured not,” Arthur said. 

Captain Monroe had been one of the best men he had ever met, honest, upright, and loyal. He wouldn’t pull the trigger against his oath even to save his own life. If that wasn’t a sign of the complications of morality, nothing was. It had taken a bad man, a killer who never minded one more body, to save the good one. Arthur hoped good Mr. Monroe had found peace and another way to make the world a better place.

“I’m hoping you can tell me something about how time frames work in the army these days.”

“What time frames are you interested in?” 

“If a kid enlisted, how long would it be before he ended up at the front?”

“There is no way to answer that question, sir. There are too many factors. What branch of service is he?”

Arthur didn’t know. He supposed Jack had headed for the Army, the biggest branch full of the most common men, but he couldn’t know that for sure.

“Army,” he said anyway.

“Okay. When did he enlist?”

“He left here with his papers almost 8 weeks ago.”

“He would likely be in a training camp then. This region has mostly sent its men to Camp Greene in North Carolina. The facilities were just built.”

“In the South?”

“Yes. The climate is most suitable for training. The winters in most places are too harsh.”

“But isn’t it… cold in Europe?” 

His answer sounded canned. “The supplies for cold weather are being directed to the front.”

Having experienced vicious, biting cold himself, Arthur thought training for it in a similar place might be better than training for it in swampy Southern air.

“Sure. How long is training camp?”

“90 days is typical.”

“Do they get mail?”

“If you knew where to send it, he would get mail a few times during training. If you had to address it generically, it would take a while to find him. He’ll probably send you letters though. Most recruits do.”

“Right.” They shook hands. “Thank you. Good luck out there.”

He wished it were as simple as that. Neither wishes nor prayers were any protection against bullets. 

In the general store, there was a rack of yellow ribbons, tied in big, swoopy bows. Arthur paused at the sign. It talked about a new song “sweeping the nation” about a girl whose yellow ribbon was a tribute to her love fighting far, far away.

_ We are proud of our boys off to fight the Huns. Take a yellow ribbon and hang it with care until your loved one returns. _

_ Courtesy of Strawberry Ladies’ Aid _

The shopkeeper had prudently placed several stacks of priced sheet music beside it and had even more judiciously added a handwritten label to one that said “To the tune of Round Her Neck She Wears a Yeller Ribbon.” Arthur suspected the shopkeeper, like himself, had no idea just what that tune was, but he was never one to begrudge someone a cleverly earned dollar.

“It’s a light order this month,” the shopkeeper said as Arthur signed the invoice.

“Hay prices went up after a wet fall.”

“Everything’s going to Hell in a handbasket as always.” The shopkeeper’s despondency, so out of character, made Arthur think of the teenage boy around the shop, packing crates, an unnoticed part of routine interactions. His absence now made more impact than his presence had.

Arthur shook his head. “Things will look up.”

But when he was carrying his last crate out the door, he grabbed one of the silly yellow bows and tucked it under the wagon seat.

  
  


* * *

  
  


Jack didn’t write.

In the midst of the first cold snap of the year, Arthur hauled their cold-weather gear out of the barn loft. His knees ached the whole way up the ladder, his shoulders protested his awkward carry the whole way down. He should have let John do it, but admitting defeat had never been his strong suit. It was bad enough to see himself hitch in the mornings worse than old Hosea. At this rate, he was starting to wonder if the old snake oil salesman had been onto something when he claimed sleeping on the ground helped his back.

Arthur dropped the trunk on the floor inside the front door of the house and rummaged out his brown wool coat.

“Hey,” John called from the bedroom. His voice had an edge of caution that made Arthur’s head snap up. “Did you finish another journal?”

“No.” Arthur glanced at the canvas-bound one on the table. When there was no further reply from the bedroom, he got back to work. He laid a pair of sheepskin gloves on top of the coat, contemplated putting them on right now. His fingers were still a little numb from working outside.

John stepped out of the bedroom. “You been going through them?”

“What?” 

“Your old journals,” John said. “Have you been going through them?”

“No. I’m not the one who said we needed to keep the damn things.”

John disappeared back into the bedroom, and Arthur finished separating out the contents of the trunk. John’s winter coat had a hole under the left armpit. Arthur walked into the bedroom for the old aluminum tin full of sewing materials. He hated sewing worse than poison. It was the only time he found himself wishing for women around this house. Susan Grimshaw would have sewn up every garment they had in half the time it took him to thread the needle to darn one.

But in the bedroom, John squatted in front of the little bookshelf, his finger skipping down the row, pulling out one book after another to peek at its cover.

“What’re you doing?” Arthur asked.

“Looking.” John barely answered, barely took note of Arthur at all.

The bookshelf would have been a great source of embarrassment to Arthur if anyone but John had known about it. They had only been living here a little while when he finished a journal. As he filled the last page, he had gotten ready to feed its papers to the fire, easy kindling. John had been horrified.

“You’re just going to burn it? You’ve been writing in it every day, huddling by a lantern and squinting your old eyes out, and now it’s nothing to you?”

Arthur hadn’t been able to adequately explain his journaling to John. It wasn’t about creating something, some finished product. It was the writing and sketching itself. But for someone who didn’t need to write to think, the completed journal itself was the accomplishment, a series of pages filled with memories and ideas. They agreed to disagree, but John built a lopsided little shelf and started to keep the journals there. 

“It’s missing,” John said. 

“What is?” 

“Your old journal.”

Arthur didn’t have to ask which one. The first book John had tucked on this shelf had been the one Arthur gave to him in unrealized farewell all those years ago. It was the book Arthur had written Dutch’s descent into madness into, had sketched his final pictures of faces he hadn’t been ready to lose, had stained with blood and dirt from the hardest days of his life. It was the journal whose leads John had chased across the West in the years after, the story told to Arthur by the beautiful Abigail Roberts who had seen it for what it was: an act of love. In it, John had marked Hamish Sinclair’s final hours and reunions with Tilly and Rains Fall. He had also drawn some truly terribly sketches of prairie poppies and frogs.

“You’re a sentimental fool, John Marston,” Arthur had said when he took the leather book back into his hands. He couldn’t believe John had carried that thing around all these years, after all this time. By then, it had borne witness not just to the words and lines in its pages but to hundreds of miles of journeys, to the evolution of both people and their world. 

A soft, silly place in Arthur’s heart had been proud of John for somehow, improbably, bringing it home.

“It can’t be gone,” Arthur chided. He squatted down beside John to look with him.

But it was. The explanation expanded to fill the silent room; Arthur couldn’t be the one to say it.

“I’ll keep looking,” John said quietly. He rubbed at his jaw, an old habit rarely seen these days. Arthur put his hand on his shoulder, squeezed for a moment, and then left him there to think about what he wasn’t going to find. 

If there was irony in Arthur to retreating to the barn with his journal now, he ignored it. He thumbed back through the pages to his entry the day after Jack’s arrival.

_ There’s something Jack isn’t telling us about why he’s here. He stands too straight to just be a lost kid looking for answers. _

Arthur read his way to the present, sighed heavily, and found he had nothing to say. 

Jack Marston wanted to be a writer, and he had come for a story. 

Arthur tried to decide how betrayed he could feel. He had always known the kid had his own reasons for being here. He was the one who had said to himself, to Bonnie MacFarlane, that those didn’t matter. Did they matter more now?

He and John had spent their youth pulling people’s hard-earned money from their stiffening, dying fingers. He supposed lifting an old raggedy journal didn’t compare on the register. In fact, if he ever had the pleasure of standing before St. Peter at the pearly gates, that vaunted saint would laugh him off the clouds for even thinking it. Arthur never expected to see Heaven. He had made his peace with his road straight to Hell a long time ago.

It was dangerous, of course, in its own way. If Jack wrote it into a book, got it published, they might be found out. They might be on the run again at a point in life where they were just too old and tired to stomach it. They might find themselves like Bill Williamson, standing at the gallows for outdated crimes from a different era.

That wasn’t what it was though. That wasn’t what pinched at his innards and brought bile into his throat. He figured that out later after the horses had been fed and dinner had been made, the fire stoked to a roar, the unsaid left to smolder and fester all evening.

In bed, staring at the ceiling, pretending to be asleep next to a man doing the same thing, Arthur figured out why Jack taking that journal knifed his guts.

It stripped them naked in front of a boy who couldn’t possibly understand. He might see the grand adventure or the pathetic, limping tragedy or the quirky slices of color. But it would be impossible for him to know more than that, even reading it through Arthur’s eyes. It was Arthur’s life story stolen away to be used however the thief pleased.

Arthur wrestled with that all night.

The sun still rose in the morning, and Arthur had come to a conclusion. He poured himself a cup of coffee, shrugged into his coat, and walked out to the barn. He got the yellow ribbon from its half-forgotten spot in the wagon. 

“What the hell is that?” John stood on the porch, front door open, still in his long johns with bare feet and his coat thrown over the top. His breath curled through the chilly air.

Arthur tied it onto a central porch post. “It’s a yellow ribbon. Means you’ve got someone off fighting this stupid war.”

John swallowed, stared at it for a few seconds too long, before coughing and lighting up a cigarette.

“Guess we do,” he said.

“Sure we do. Boy’s a touch stupid like his father. You always were the worst at writing letters too.”

“Shut up, Morgan.”

“‘Arthur,’” Arthur deepened his voice, adding a little whiskey and gravel, “‘Gone off to rob a mining camp. Think I might get gold. John.” 

“It had the facts,” John interrupted mildly.

“No mention of where this mine is. Certainly, no one would suspect it to be the nearest mine, which was, by the way, a coal mine.”

“Nothing on the sign said coal mine…"

“Just ‘Gone off robbing.’ I’m wondering to myself if I should start worrying after a couple days or a couple weeks. Had no way of knowing you would have gotten yourself picked up within a matter of hours.”

“Jesus, this is revisionist history by a mile. I got picked up trying to get Javier off a jail transport after he got taken in doing something completely different.”

They walked back inside, Banjo trotting at their heels, and kept up the argument all the way through breakfast, letting the story become equal parts fiction and fact. They could both see the yellow ribbon through the window, even sitting at the table.

  
  


* * *

  
  


The first letter came less than a week later. Jack complained about the food and the care packages from Wallace (_three bars of scented soap in one package... has the whole regiment calling me Squeaky) _ and shared funny stories about his bunkmates, two boys who had started out with normal Christian names of Mark and Joseph but ended up being called Doc and Spud. 

And a few missives after that, Jack sent them a package. They unwrapped it to find the missing journal and the little black leather book they had seen Jack write in so many times before. The enclosed letter was long, telling them he was off to the much-feared front. He promised them he would be careful (_probably spend most of my time up to my elbows in muck winning cigarettes in poker games_) and wished he could see them before he shipped out. He shared a few more funny stories.

The letter closed,

_ I took something that belonged to both of you and I shouldn’t have. I had been wanting to be a writer, but I had nothing to say. Then Ma told me my famous outlaw father was still alive, and I thought I’d find him and get some stories. I could sell them as pulp fiction since the Old West is fashionable. _

_ I was wrong, and I’m sorry. I never showed the journal or my writing to anyone. Please forgive me. _

_ Love, _

_ Jack Marston _

In the quiet of their warm house, they opened the little black book. Jack’s handwriting swooped across the pages, that newfangled cursive that flowed in on itself aggressively. Arthur squinted his way through a few sentences before John kicked him. He grumbled his way to the bedroom.

When he reemerged with his reading glasses perched on his nose, he began to read aloud, though John was right beside him. It was a novel, handwritten in different shades of ink and graphite, smudged and smeared. 

The nameless main character was an outlaw on the run from the law. He slunk from town to town, pulling down his bounty posters and trying to learn more about the mysterious federal agencies that seemed to be chasing him. 

It was imperfect, the prose at times clumsy, the plot both rushed and drawn out by turns, but Arthur could not turn away. John made him stop, so he could go take a piss, and Arthur read on impatiently on his own.

_ The scars gleamed in lantern light. The bartender nodded to the cowboy, but he said nothing. Sometimes he wished for invisible scars like the ones everyone else bore. Nobody would be able to paint those on wanted posters. _

Instinctively, Arthur rubbed his own jaw as he read, half-imagined the scars as his own. He started back where they had left off when John got back.

Fifty pages in, the cowboy found an old friend, another nameless, faceless outlaw in this fictional landscape. They stayed together on the run until a cashier’s bloody death at the hands of other criminals sobered them up.

_ They had each thought the other wanted to keep robbing and killing, so they never talked about it. Now they both knew the other wanted to stop. So they did. The world was full of disagreeable men, but these two agreed on everything. _

The fictional cowboys made connections in a tiny town in Montana. They built a cabin beside a lake full of sockeye salmon and rainbow trout. They raised a dog from a tiny puppy. They broke horses together and shot bottles off the porch railing.

_ The cowboy built a bigger bed that first Christmas_. _ He never had to ask his friend to share it. _

The novel wound its way through tense final chapters. The men started to see signs of the world closing in on them. Notices in town with their faces on them. A pair of bounty hunters cutting through their property. In the final pages, a swarm of federal agents, armed to the teeth and joined by members of the U.S. Army, showed up to end the story.

_ “We can’t shoot our way out of this.” The cowboy cocked the hammer. _

_ “Nope.” His friend unholstered his pistols. _

_ They opened the barn door together. _

The writing stopped there.

“That’s the end?” John grabbed the book and flipped it over as if it were going to produce more text. 

“Guess so,” Arthur said. His cheeks burned red, but his heart pattered feather-light in his chest. It seemed Jack had understood a whole lot more than they had given him credit for. 

John frowned. He snapped the book shut.

“He killed us,” John said. “You’re a writer. Is this a metaphor?”

“I’m not a writer,” Arthur began, but then he saw no reason to start that argument. He shook his head. “No, it’s not a metaphor. It’s just your son giving you a chance to know he sees you. Y’know, really sees you. He’s just also telling a story.”

John cradled the book in his hands. “I think he could have let us live.” 

“The real story’s not as exciting.” Arthur shrugged. “People like bloody endings.”

But John’s face became serious. He folded Arthur’s hand in his and pulled him from their chairs to the front door. He pushed it open so hard it rattled on its hinges, but the theatricality didn’t seem to phase him. 

The dusky sky had big gray clouds hanging across the stars, so low they seemed to brush the tops of the biggest trees. It smelled like pine and impending snow. Banjo broke past them with an exuberant bark, chasing after some unseen critter. One lantern still glowed in the barn, a soft reminder the chores were not yet finished. John would probably handle things out there today; Arthur would put the clean sheets on the bed and heat up leftover salt pork and potatoes.

The porch railing hung a little crooked on the left side. Somebody would have to fix the missing slat in the next couple days. It would be whoever got to it first on their to-do list.

Arthur knew what John was going to say before he said it. He started smiling before John could get a word out.

“I think,” John paused, enjoyed a rare moment of showboating, “the real story is the most exciting one I’ve ever heard”

They stepped together, stood too close, shared the kind of toe-curling look bred from long familiarity. Arthur touched the crow’s feet at the corner of John’s eye, slid his thumb down a crease along his cheek. 

“And I think any writer worth his salt,” John continued, “would know the two old cowboys dying in a hail of bullets is the easy way out. Letting them have a happy ending… that’s hard work.”

“It certainly has more barn chores,” Arthur said through a cough that was part laugh and part lump in his throat.

They kissed on their front porch until the snow arrived, until their noses were frozen, until their fingers and toes cried uncle. 

They went back inside to keep working on their happy ending. They had a son to get home and an ornery colt to train, love to make and fish to catch, card games to argue over and great books to read together.

They weren't done yet.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm posting the epilogue too, but please, if you're not sure you like epilogues, you do not have to follow me there. 
> 
> But if you like _epilogues_, like full-tilt, here's how everybody ends up with a hearty dash of emotion, I'll see you there.
> 
> You readers have made writing and revising this story such a joy, and I will truly miss it. I'll miss bending the canon for my two cowboys and sharing that with you! Thank you for taking your time to write your thoughts to me. <3


	21. Epilogue

On November 12, 1918, Strawberry, Big Valley got word of the armistice agreement. On November 13, two days after the rest of the world, so did Arthur Morgan and John Marston. The war was over. 

It changed nothing, of course. They still knew no more than they did from their last letter. Jack had lice and two broken fingers, neither of which were on his trigger hand. He remained unbeaten at all betting games, and both of his buddies from training camp were still breathing, though Spud had been shipped off to the hospital after a gas attack.

But their steps were lighter, their banter easier, their days happier. 

When they got his letter saying he was finally coming home, he also said he had a surprise.

On March 21, 1919, Jack Marston parked his car in front of their house and opened the passenger side door for a petite redhead.

“This is my wife,” Jack had bobbled proudly on the word, “Nora. Nora, this is my father, John, and my Uncle Arthur.”

Nora had pincurls, a slight stammer, and a sweet smile. She had been a combat nurse for the British Army, and Jack had met her while visiting Spud in the medical tent. She had been taking a smoke break out back at the same time he had, her hands bloody and shaky, her mouth profane. She had just watched a failed operation on a kid who barely looked old enough to enlist. 

“I didn’t make a very good impression,” Nora explained. “I… apologized.”

“I told her if I lived to the end, I’d come find her in England and let her make a better one.” Jack was sheepish. “There’s a lot of Noras there. It took a while.”

The story would have been too sickeningly sweet for most people, but for the two old fools who had been hungry for the sight of their boy, it was a fast favorite. 

Jack and Nora stayed nearly a month, and if the young lovers had any secrets from each other, Arthur and John never stumbled upon them. She called John “Pa” too, and some mornings, in the barn, she had on John’s hat, pulled from the bedside table, worn as casually as any other. 

It was hard to see the couple go, the kind of hard Arthur and John liked, like saying “Catch you later” to Bonnie MacFarlane Walters.

In December that same year, they sent a letter to Canada. Jack had called in some favors with some buddies from the service and had gotten in touch with a Charles Smith who just might be a grizzled old outlaw. They worded the letter a little recklessly, using their real names, taking a risk in hopes of a reward.

Charles Smith wrote back, and within a few weeks, they had gotten themselves train tickets and paid the Strawberry shopkeeper’s son to watch the farm. 

When they got off at the train station in Saskatchewan, Arthur and John saw him at the arrival bench. His braids had gray threaded through, his skin lined with new wrinkles, but his face was the same they had known. 

“Arthur,” Charles said it with all the affection of a time gone by. They hugged for a long time. 

It was the month-long vacation none of them had ever had before. They met Charles’ wife and their two children, smart, quick-tongued girls. They fished for Northern Pike in frigid waters, talking in the long stretches between bites, and went to see _ The Curious Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde _in the local cinema. They argued over its merits while drinking late-night coffee.

They told Charles what happened to Javier and Dutch and Abigail. They told him about their farm and their horses. They told him about Jack and Nora.

They shared the guest bedroom at the Smith house.

In 1921, the next phase of their lives began with a sharp, piercing cry in the middle of the night halfway across the country from them. Jack and Nora welcomed their first child, a girl named Abigail Elizabeth. Wallace burst with pride, sending out birth announcements to everyone, even Jack’s old employers, the Callahan brothers.

Arthur and John had hung the announcement on their wall with a chuckle, though it arrived after they had already had their first visit from the little family.

Jack brought them another surprise a few weeks after that: the papers he had just signed for a little house in West Elizabeth, near Blackwater. 

“I am going to write for the Ledger,” he told them. “It’s a small paper, but it’s a good safe place for Nora and Lizzie and... I just think it’s a good start.”

It was a day’s ride on horseback, less than that by car. 

By the time Lizzie was ten and joined by two younger sisters and a younger brother, she had been known to sneak out and make the trip by herself to see her Grampa and Pops. They had bought her first pony, a reliable little paint gelding, and they trusted him completely. They were good with first ponies; they had trained Sarah Grace Walters’ little chestnut only a few years before.

Arthur taught the grandchildren how to ride. John taught them how to milk cows and train puppies. They both read old favorite stories for long indulgent hours and talked Jack and Nora into sleepovers in Big Valley as Christmas tradition. They filled the stockings together with handmade toys and store-bought playing cards. Arthur ate Santa’s cookies on his own.

Their hands got shaky, their knees got creaky, and by the time he was white-headed and bent, Arthur’s tobacco cough became more sinister. The cancer spread so quickly as to be merciful.

In his own bed at home, John holding his hand and whispering the Lord’s prayer, Jack in the bedside chair with tears in his eyes, Arthur said his goodbyes. Nora and the children waited in the living room, having already received their blessings from the old sinner.

At 76, Arthur went first. As he had insisted. 

They buried him out by Abigail’s cross and Grim and Buell’s graves. Abigail might not have wanted to be laid to rest beside a stubborn old gelding for all eternity, but it would have suited Arthur just fine. There was no pastor at the graveside, just the family and Bonnie MacFarlane.

John wrote to Charles Smith afterward. Then he decided it was worth a shot and wrote up an obituary for Arthur Tacitus Callahan. Jack edited it for him. John sent it to newspapers from Saint Denis to New York in hopes that anyone still out there might be able to read the kind words about the surprisingly gentle man.

Jack and Nora expected John to fall apart. They both visited more often, spent more nights, insisted they needed Ada and Finn out of their hair at least three times a month. 

But John stayed steady. He took extra care of Devil who had grown long of tooth and tolerant enough for grandkids to lead. He still hunted on foot and kept his own table full. They had given up client horses years ago.

When Arthur had been gone a few months, John pulled Jack aside. They sat down after dinner, and John placed the old leatherbound journal they all knew so well into Jack’s hands.

“Listen, me and Arthur talked it over. Go ahead. It’s yours.” John poured himself a glass of whiskey and gulped a shot’s worth down.

“Pa, I…”

“Don’t interrupt me,” John said. “You never wanted to write for a newspaper. You wanted to write books. You wanted to be an author. This is the story you wanted to tell.”

“No, it’s your story, and…”

“It’s your story now.”

Jack stared down at the journal as if it were a ticket to paradise. “Okay, Pa. Thank you.”

It took him a couple of years to write it. Nora complained about the late nights, the bedside lamp burning brightly while he wrote it all out by hand in his own little black book. World War II slowed them down, their Lizzie taking off to work in a factory, bright pink kerchief tied in her hair and men’s boots in her feet.

“Do you think Dutch went crazy before Hosea died?” Jack would ask Nora over morning coffee. “Or do you think he lost his sanity after?”

“I have to do something about the way I’m writing Micah,” Jack lamented to Lizzie as he threw a ball for their pup in the yard. “He’s a mustache-twirling caricature in my work, but that can’t be how it really was.”

“I don’t want to make the connection between Arthur and Ma seem like a romance,” Jack explained, asking Nora to read over yet another revision of a fishing scene.

By the time he finished the third draft, he asked his father if he wanted to read it. John declined.

“I’m sure you did a fine job, but I lived it. You don’t want me picking at what you’ve done,” John said.

He asked his other father to read it, and Wallace pronounced it would be the next great American novel. He might have been a little biased.

In 1946, Jack got a publisher for his novel who would agree to keep his identity secret. In 1947, the little Western debuted to little attention. It began simply, 

_ This story is all true. Names cannot be changed to protect the innocent, for there were none. It was an outlaw’s west, and Arthur Morgan was the best shot in the famed Van der Linde gang. _

But not long after its release, The New York Times wrote a review about its dubious reliability, said “J. Marston, whoever he really is, writes lies dressed in the poorly-made costumes of truth. No one should read this spurious rubbish.”

Thanks to their scathing indictment, _ Red Dead _rose to the top of the bestseller list and stayed there. Jack batted away requests his publisher forwarded to him for motion picture rights. He even ignored a letter from the head of Columbia Pictures promising him John Wayne for the part of Arthur Morgan.

“It can’t ever be a movie,” Jack explained to Nora. “They gave me the story to tell, not anyone else.”

She understood. 

A few years later, John Marston dropped dead of a heart attack in his own kitchen. The attending physician Jack called said it would have been instant. The old outlaw was 80.

His family laid him to rest next to Arthur, but it was hard to shed many tears. There was no one left who had ever known a world where Arthur Morgan and John Marston weren’t together. Jack knew somewhere they were glad to be reunited.

He and Nora sold their house and moved onto the Owanjila property. 

The Marstons were happy there, just as the man who built it had been, just as the man he had built it for had been. They worked every day to live up to its legacy of love and redemption.

Sometimes Jack would have sworn he could hear the song they taught him all those years ago, whispering through the purple-flowered fields as he rode the property. Of course, he knew that meant he was a fool, for he didn’t even recognize half of the voices he heard singing, 

_ “I’ve rambled and trampled this wide world around, raising hell with the gang that’s where I am bound.” _

Jack liked to hum along.

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sappy, sappy, sappy. <3


End file.
